Rent-seeking in the trade sector is an outcome of restrictions imposed on tariffs and import quotas by a government. In an effort to acquire more privilege in foreign trade, labor allocates a part of its time-effort to rent-seeking activity, while cutting down on production work. Given the importance of rent-seeking activity due to restrictions imposed by the government in the Iranian economy, ...

The costs of rent seeking exceed traditional measures when opportunity cost is considered. When the quantity of resources consumed by rent seeking is large, rent seeking draws consumer surplus out of alternative resource employments. The costs of rent seeking differ in partial and general equilibrium frameworks; Tullock (1989) recognizes this but incorrectly argues that rent seeking costs are t...

I develop a model of rent seeking with informational foundations and an arbitrary number of rent seekers, and I compare the results with Tullock’s (1980) classic model where the influence activities are “blackboxed.” Given the microfoundations, the welfare consequences of rent seeking can be studied. In particular, I show that competition among rent seekers can be socially beneficial, since the...

Advocates of rent control often argue that rent control aids the mixing of rich and poor, and perhaps of the races as well. Economic theory does not necessarily predict that rent control will reduce segregation. The best case for rent control as an aid to integration is that it creates pockets of low rent (and low quality) apartments in expensive cities. However, by creating an excess of demand...

Rent-seeking models have been used to predict and explain a wide variety of political decisions. This paper extends Tullock’s classic rent-seeking model to the case of a risky rent, where the winner of the rent-seeking contest does not receive the rent for sure, but only probabilistically. We derive the equilibrium and comparative static predictions from our extended model and present the resul...

The establishment of a tradable permit market requires the regulator to select a level of aggregate emissions and then distribute the associated permits to specific groups. Both these decisions create opportunities for rent seeking. In this paper, we use a contest model to analyse the incentives to rent seek for pollution permits and to analyse the consequences for social welfare. We find diffe...

Access to affordable housing has been a long-standing issue for households in most cities. This paper reports on a study of house rent prices in Port Moresby, factors influencing them, and affordability of the prices. Data was obtained from houses that were advertised for rent in Port Moresby for a period of 13 months and were analysed using the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model. Th...

Between 1999 and 2006, there were two episodes during which inflation in the Rent index in the CPI diverged markedly from inflation in the index for Owner’s Equivalent Rent (OER); early in 2007, these series began to diverge again. Such divergence often prompts many to question CPI methods. A key difference between these two series is that OER indexes are based upon rents which have received a ...