The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent-seeking motives increase public debt and deficits. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a...

The absence of a competitive market may enable public-sector workers to extract rents from taxpayers in the form of high pay, especially when public-sector workers are unionized. On the other hand, this rent extraction may be suppressed by the ability of taxpayers to vote with their feet,...

We analyze government interventions to alleviate debt overhang among banks. Interventions generate two types of rents. Informational rents arise from opportunistic participation based on private information while macroeconomic rents arise from free riding. Minimizing informational rents is a...

Recent policy proposals have suggested taxing top incomes at very high rates on the grounds that some or all of the highest wage earners are engaged in socially unproductive or counterproductive activities, such as externality imposing speculation in the financial sector. To address this, we...

Two types of political conflicts of interest pervade many of the world's societies. A horizontal conflict of interest arises when different constituencies support different policies, while a vertical conflict of interest emerges when those in charge of running the government acquire and retain...

We develop a model that shows how rent-seeking behavior on the part of division managers can subvert the workings of an internal capital market. In an effort to stop rent-seeking, corporate headquarters will be effectively forced into paying bribes to some division managers. And because...

This paper studies the effect of policy uncertainty on the formation of new activities in Romer's (1994) type of an economy, where productivity of labor increases with the number of capital goods. Adding a new capital good requires a capital specific set-up cost, invested prior to using the...

This paper analyzes the roots of variation in de facto institutions, within a constant de jure institutional setting. We explore the role of rent-seeking episodes in colonial Brazil as determinants of the quality of current local institutions, and argue that this variation reveals a de facto...

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on the likelihood of violent attacks against black politicians. I find a strong positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes increases the...

This article studies traditional and modern theories of executive compensation, bringing them together under a unifying framework. We analyze assignment models of the level of pay, and static and dynamic moral hazard models of incentives, and compare their predictions to empirical findings. We...