1. Several market failures would justify some forms of price control and entry regulation in the taxicab industry. Unfortunately, history shows that very often the taxi regulators get captured by taxi operators' lobbies and fail to adapt their regulation to changing market conditions. Hence,...

This article analyses through a rent seeking model, the relationship between institutions' quality and natural resources. Depending on the institutions quality, each country has a specific structural capacity to stand natural resources dependency. It is shown that for each country, a threshold...

In this paper, we present a rent-seeking model of conflict, which highlights the role of ideology in determining whether the government or the rebels take the initiative. We use the model to interpret the impact of a large-scale Community-Driven Development project on civil conflict in the...

In this chapter, we propose a primer of the treatment that has received in the economic literature the problematic of entrepreneurship and rent-seeking behavior. It comprises the introduction of employed concepts, the discussion of the allocation of entrepreneurs between different types of...

Evidence shows that the allocation of talented people is not neutral for growth. Thus, a country with a large population of law concentrators tends to develop rent-seeking activities that reduce growth. A country with a large population of engineers tends to foster innovation and strengthen...

We develop a new mechanism through which skilled migration may influence economicperformance in the sending country. If agents can choose between acting asrent-seekers and engaging in productive activities, and only productive skills are exportable,a positive probability of migration (to a more...

This paper investigates risk and stability features of Islamic banking using a sample of 553 banks from 24 countries between 1999 and 2009. Small Islamic banks that are leveraged or based in countries with predominantly Muslim populations have lower credit risk than conventional banks. In terms...

We consider a framework à la Wirl (1994) where political liberalization is the outcome of a lobbying differential game between a conservative elite and a reformist group, the former player pushing against political liberalization in opposition to the latter. In contrast to the benchmark model,...