The resources two rival businesses spend to raise their own chance of getting a unique monopoly license are a cost of rent-seeking. When those businesses differ in the costs of producing the monopoly good there is an additional cost of rent-seeking that has not been studied in the literature. If...

This paper proposes churned transfers as a measure of political inefficiency. A transfer is churned when at least the same level of voter satisfaction could have been achieved by lowering the voter's tax burden by the amount of the transfer. Previous measures of political efficiency---Pommerehne...

Universal social benefits seem to contradict important notions in economics. They are poorly targeted and must be paid for by what seem to be high taxes. This paper describes the costs of universality and then proposes two competing explanations for why an electorate might wish to pay these...

Painkilling drugs produce a good called relief which reduces the fixed level of bad (pain) the individual is endowed with. These drugs have the side-effect of reducing the utility the individual gets from consuming goods. This means that the shadow price of relief counts not only the cost of...

When ability to avoid rent control is randomly distributed over landlords, housing may rise above its free market level. Landlords evading part of rent-control are like suppliers selling to a perfectly price-discriminating monopsonist. A continuum of evasive abilities gives a range of low rent...

Using surveys of the Czech Republic taken in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 we measure how the percentage of tax evaders evolved from 1995 until 2006. We find that at first evasion rose, leveled off, and then fell along a quadratic path, suggesting the existence of what we call an evasional Kuznets...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...

The resources two rival businesses spend to raise their own chance of getting a unique monopoly license are a cost of rent-seeking. When those businesses differ in the costs of producing the monopoly good there is an additional cost of rent-seeking that has not been sufficiently studied in the...

In what circumstances should foreign aid be given to less developed countries with repressive rulers? Repressive rulers are assumed to control the national income and to trade it against the probability of staying in office which is assumed in turn to depend positively on popular wealth and...