Universal service objectives are pervasive in telecommunications, and have gained new relevance after liberalization and the introduction of competition in many markets. Despite their policy relevance, little work has been done allowing for a thorough discussion of instruments designed to...

In this paper, we examine how cross-market price restrictions impact strategic entry and pricing decisions. A motivating example is the 1996 Act in the United States which opens telecommunications markets to competition and contains a provision for universal service, requiring that advanced...

We present a flexible model of monopoly nonlinear pricing with endogenous participation decisions of heterogeneous consumers. We make use of the moments that define the few self-selecting tariff options that are commonly used to implement the optimal nonlinear tariff to estimate how demand and...

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 "black-boxed." Given the microfoundations, the welfare consequences of rent seeking can be...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest how institutions can be created and modified to devise and implement industrial policy in the emerging market economies. Two main issues confronting industrial policy institutions are how to avoid regulatory capture, that is, having those policy-makers...

We develop a model in which two firms that have proposed to merge are privately informed about merger-specific efficiencies. This enables the firms to influence the merger control procedure by strategically revealing their information to an antitrust authority. Although the information improves...

Academics' view of the benefits of finance vastly exceeds societal perception. This dissonance is at least partly explained by an under-appreciation by academia of how, without proper rules, finance can easily degenerate into a rent-seeking activity. I outline what finance academics can do, from...

The goal of this paper is to propose a simple paradigm for understanding rent seeking and corruption in the growth context. We develop an endogenous growth model where entrepreneurs, as intermediate-good producers, may engage in rent-seeking activities. The latter are defined by the following...

Using novel indicators of political connections constructed from campaign contribution data, we show that Brazilian firms that provided contributions to (elected) federal deputies experienced higher stock returns than firms that don’t around the 1998 and 2002 elections. This suggests...

We examine who benefits when there is a strong leader in place, and those who benefit when a situation lacks a proper leader. There are fractious terrorist groups who seek to serve the same people in a common cause against a common enemy. The groups compete for rents obtained from the public by...