Large-scale land acquisitions often take place in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendliness caused by weak institutional frameworks. We hypothesize that corruption indeed leads to more land deals. We argue that corrupt elites exploit poor institutional setups...

The objective of this paper is to show how the same market failures that contribute to urban sprawl also contribute to urban blight. The paper develops a simple dynamic model in which new suburban and older central-city properties compete for mobile residents. The level of housing services...

It has been argued that in the absence of altruism, intergenerational transfers can survive only if the old are net recipients. I prove that this need not hold in an over-lapping generations model with a fixed factor. For example, the middle-aged owning land may gain by providing public...

In this paper we investigate optimal harvesting of a renewable natural resource. While in the standard approach the resource is located at a single point in space we allow for the resource to be distributed over the plane. Consequently, an agent who exploits the resource has to travel from one...

We propose a framework with endogenous allocation of land between agricultural production, sustainable forest management, and unsustainable forest exploitation in the form of illegal logging to explore deforestation and agricultural and timber supplies when property rights are insecure....

We extend the model of insecure property rights by Tornell and Velasco (1992) and Tornell and Lane (1999) by adding three features: (i) extracting the common property asset involves a private appropriation cost, (ii) agents derive utility from wealth as well as from consumption, and (iii) agents...

This paper examines the effect of trade integration and comparative advantage on one of a country's institutions, which in turn inuences its economic efficiency. The environment we explore is one in which a country's lower classes may revolt and appropriate wealth owned by a ruling elite. The...

We analyze a theoretical model in which entrepreneurs' property rights are threatened by "raiders" who can challenge them to a contest for control of their firms. Entrepreneurs have heterogeneous productivity, and decide how much capital to invest before raiders decide whom to attack. In...