Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

IPCC (2022) documents a looming gap between climate goals and implemented policies and points to a lack of political commitment. We study policymakers' incentives to commit. A policymaker decides on a policy to encourage citizens to make investments and determines the degree of flexibility to...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the impact of inequality on economic growth. Both theoretical and empirical approaches have produced ambiguous results on sign and size of this relationship. Although there is a considerable part of the literature that considers inequality...

A government officials' propensity to corruption, or corruptibility, can be affected by his intertemporal preference over job benefits. Through a dynamic model of rent-seeking behavior, this paper examines how endogenously determined corruptibility changes with monitoring intensity, salary...

Trade opportunities are generally seen as valuable instruments to improve the allocation of resources in society. However, when the traded rights are secured through unproductive rent-seeking contests, the tradeability of the rents may provide stronger incentives to invest in rent-seeking...