This article studies the evolution of housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917 covering an eventful period Russian world history. We collect digitize over 5,000 rental advertisements from historic newspapers, which we use together with geo-coded addresses detailed structural characteristics to construct a quality-adjusted rent price index continuous time. provide first pre-war pre...

Most cities in Germany regularly publish a booklet called \Mietspiegel" that allows calculating an estimate of the fair rent for a at. The Functional Rent Advisor (FRA) extends the functionality and applicability of the \Mietspiegel" for the city of Munich so that the user needs not to give all required information. The FRA is implemented using the high-level purely functional language Haskell....

This paper shows that a policy that uniformly increases contestants’ e¤ort costs can lead to an increase in total e¤ort. In asymmetric settings, this “levels the playing …eld”and therefore encourages weaker players (who otherwise would have stayed out) to enter. Paradoxically, a contest designer whose only objective is to maximize total e¤ort may thus wish to make rent-seeking “more di¢ cult.” ...

We consider which factors determined the price–rent ratio for the housing market in 18 U. S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and at the national level over the period of 1975– 2014. Based on a present-value framework, our proposed empirical model separates the price–rent ratio for a given market into unobserved components related to the expected real rent growth and the expected housing r...

Rent-Sharing, Hold-up, and Wages: Evidence from Matched Panel Data It is widely believed that rent-sharing reduces the incentives for investment when long term contracts are infeasible because some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. We propose a simple test for the degree of hold-up based on the fraction of capital costs that are deducted from the quasi-rent that determines...

Empirical studies have shown that preferences for redistribution are significantly correlated with expectations of future mobility and the belief that society offers equal opportunities. We add to previous research by investigating the role of individual and social norms on rent seeking. We find that the individual propensity for stigmatizing rent seeking significantly and positively affects pr...

Firm Size, Economic Situation and Influence Activities This paper discusses the optimal firm size in the presence of influence activities, and the level of individual rent-seeking dependent on the economic situation of the firm. Since firm size has a discouraging effect on the level of individual rent-seeking but also a quantity effect as the number of rent-seekers increases, the interplay of b...