Public universities in the United States typically charge much higher tuition to non-residents. Perhaps due, at least in part, to these differences in tuition, roughly 75 percent of students nationwide attend in-state institutions. While distinguishing between residents and non-residents is...

A number of formerly regulated multiproduct industries have a transitional or permanent residual regulatory mandate to protect consumers from "excessive" prices. The legislation that deregulated most rail rates contains a statutory mandate for the regulator to protect shippers from "excessive"...

A number of formerly regulated multiproduct industries have a transitional or permanent residual regulatory mandate to protect consumers from "excessive" prices. The legislation that deregulated most rail rates contains a statutory mandate for the regulator to protect shippers from "excessive"...

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...