Rent control is an economic abomination. It diverts investments away from residential rent units, it leads to their deterioration, it is responsible for urban decay such as in the South Bronx, it does not help poor tenants, it is a horrendous means of income redistribution. Yet this economic regulation is beloved of intellectuals (hot beds of pro rent control sentiment are Berkeley, Ann Arbor a...

This paper conceptualises foreign aid as a geopolitical form of rent in order to help distinguish the conditions under which aid is detrimental to sustained economic recovery from those where it is beneficial. Foreign aid shares with natural resource rent and contrived (i.e., government monopoly) rent the property of being a large revenue stream that is detached from the economic activity that ...

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...

Since cultural monuments and/or heritage sites, depending on the degree of their international recognition, generate economic activity and contribute to the economy of the countries in which they are located, one should regard them as valuable economic resources. Th e aim of this work is to fi rstly, address the issue of economically eff ective and socially responsible management of cultural mo...

In this paper we present a model where agents can choose between 1 productive and rent-seeking activities.We consider two governance institutions: 2 autocracy and parliament rule. Under autocracy rent-seeking reflects the taste 3 of the autocrat for such activities. Under parliament rule rent-seeking depends 4 on parliament voting. We show that under parliament rule the size of rent5 seeking ma...

Diversity is often thought to create conflict and harm economic institutions. We hypothesize, however, that the impact of diversity is conditional on political institutions, and may be negative in some settings but positive in others, due to differences in the nature of rent seeking in different regimes. To test this hypothesis, we estimate the impact of diversity on economic freedom, condition...