DO TAX CUTS ENCOURAGE RENT SEEKING BY TOP CORPORATE EXECUTIVES? THEORY AND EVIDENCE

This paper explores the role of tax policy in shaping incentives for executive effort (labor supply) and rent seeking within the firm. We develop a theoretical model that distinguishes between effort and rent‐seeking responses to income taxes, and provides a framework to estimate a lower bound for the rent‐seeking response. Using executive compensation and governance data, we find that rent seeking represents an important component of the response to changes in tax rates, especially among executives in firms with the worst corporate governance. (JEL D31, G30, H21)     

On the Existence and Uniqueness of Pure-Strategy Nash Equilibrium in Asymmetric Rent-Seeking Contests

There can be three types of heterogeneity among players in a rent‐seeking contest. First, effectiveness of player's effort on the winning probabilities may differ among players. Secondly, players may evaluate the rent or prize of the rent‐seeking contest differently. Thirdly, players may face different financial constraints. This article proves under standard assumptions in the literature that there exists a unique pure‐strategy Nash equilibrium in a general asymmetric rent‐seeking contest with these three types of heterogeneity among players.     

Rent Seeking for Pure Public Goods: Wealth and Group's Size Heterogeneity

We study how between‐group wealth and size asymmetries affect aggregate rent‐seeking efforts when two groups compete for the allocation of a pure public good. Unlike with previous analyses on between‐group asymmetries, we measure the utility cost of rent‐seeking in terms of the loss in private consumption an individual faces when contributing to this activity. Our main result is that fewer between‐group asymmetries do not necessarily imply greater aggregate rent‐seeking efforts. The result is at odds with the commonly held notion that the more homogeneous the contestants in a static rent‐seeking model, the greater the aggregate rent‐seeking efforts.     

A Rent-Seeking Experiment for the Classroom

Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that active learning techniques improve student comprehension and retention of abstract economic ideas such as rent seeking. Instructors can reinforce the concept of rent seeking with a classroom game, particularly one involving real money. The authors improve upon a game first introduced by Goeree and Holt (1999) and later expanded upon by Bischoff and Hofmann (2002). The authors present a version of the game in which students participate in an all-pay auction, risking their own money, and discover first hand the potential inefficiencies of rent seeking. The authors suggest extensions of the rent-seeking game, including discussions of social welfare effects, equity, campaign finance reform, tax simplification, and congressional reforms designed to limit the influence of rent seeking in the economy.     

The Efficiency Gains from Deregulation

We analyze the efficiency gains from deregulating monopolies using an equilibrium rent seeking model. McCormick, Shughart and Tollison (1984) argue that the initial effort to establish regulation dissipates the monopoly profit, limiting the gain from deregulation to the efficiency cost of monopoly. We establish conditions under which this proposition holds; in particular, the initial rent seekers must fail to anticipate the possibility of deregulation. Additionally, through application of the standard rent seeking model, we establish that the potential welfare gains exceed the cost of achieving deregulation. Our results provide support for policies aimed at eliminating monopoly and other types of economic distortion.     

Signaling in a Rent‐Seeking Contest with One‐Sided Asymmetric Information

We consider a two‐player rent‐seeking Tullock contest where one player has private information about his valuation of the prize, which can be high or low. This player can send a costly signal to his opponent, i.e., he can commit to reduce the prize either by some absolute amount of money or proportionally, conditional on winning it. We show that both kinds of signaling imply completely opposite results for separating equilibria, both in terms of conditions for existence and the type of player who sends the costly signal.     

The Macroeconomic Consequences of Reciprocity in Labor Relations*

We develop and analyze a structural model of efficiency wages founded on reciprocity. Workers are assumed to face an explicit trade‐off between the disutility of providing effort and the psychological benefit of reciprocating the gift of a wage offer above some reference level. The model provides a rationale for rent sharing—a feature that is very much present in the data but absent from previous formulations of the efficiency wage hypothesis. This firm‐internal perspective on efficiency wages has potentially important macroeconomic consequences: rent‐sharing considerations promote wage rigidity, internal amplification and differential responses to technology and demand shocks.     

Rent Seeking with Politically Contestable Rights to Tariff‐rate Import Quotas**

This paper analyzes rent seeking for agricultural import quotas and the associated waste of resources when politically contestable licenses are allocated to either or both importers and exporters. In a two‐stage simultaneous contest where firms seek rent for licenses and then bargain over the import/export price, it is shown that (1) rents are not dissipated completely because of uncertainty in allocation of “rights,” (2) the dissipation ratio increases if the country with a more competitive contest increases the probability of establishing licenses, (3) rent seeking may cause the market structure to change, (4) less rent is dissipated in the case of pre‐existing market power, and (5) allocation of multiple licenses decreases rent‐seeking outlays.     

RENT SEEKING AND TAX REFORM

Tax reform can either increase or reduce the amount of rent seeking, depending essentially on what is done. If tax reform involved eliminating special treatment of special groups and using the money saved either to lower the general tax rate or to discontinue government activities that most people would be better off without, then it would reduce the amount of rent seeking. Savings may, however, be used to reduce the degree of generally beneficial government activity. This is rather apt to increase the amount of rent seeking in the long run.     

Exit from Rent‐Seeking Contests

The object of this paper is to investigate the long‐run behaviour of rent‐seekers in a situation where they incur negative expected payoffs due to increasing returns to rent‐seeking expenditures. To this end, we embed the one‐shot rent‐seeking game presented by Tullock (1980) in the war‐of‐attrition framework. In this multi‐period setting, each player not only determines his or her rent‐seeking expenditure but also chooses a mixed strategy on whether to stay in or exit from rent‐seeking competition in each period. JEL Classification Numbers: D72, C72, L12     

Where are the rent seekers?

In a remarkably simple and yet one of the most original and insightful observations of 20th century economics, Gordon Tullock pointed out that there are efficiency losses when public policies and political behavior create contestable rents. Tullock also observed that social losses from contesting rents appeared smaller than might be expected, so raising the question ‘where are the rent seekers?’ Tullock proposed that political accountability and ‘free-riding’ incentives in interest groups limit social losses from rent seeking. We affirm Tullock’s explanations, which apply differently under different political institutions. We compare Tullock with Gary Becker, who focused on deadweight losses from redistribution and concluded, in contrast to Tullock, that political redistribution is efficient. The comparison with Becker highlights the significance of the recognition of Tullock’s concept of rent seeking. By excluding rent-seeking losses from the social costs of redistribution, Becker could arrive at a conclusion more favorable than Tullock to an ideology that sees merit in extensive redistribution. Tullock’s model, although more encompassing of actual social costs of redistribution, would have been less welcome in the social democratic welfare state.     

Rent Seeking and Allocative Efficiency

This paper considers a rent‐seeking game (specifically, a winner‐takes‐all contest) with incomplete information. By allowing for sequential moves, a Bayesian‐Stackelberg equilibrium can be constructed. It can be shown that, at the Bayesian‐Stackelberg equilibrium, it is always possible that the allocative efficiency argument fails. That is, there are cases in which the Stackelberg follower is more efficient but loses the contest. Using a specific class of distributions, it is also shown that sometimes the corrupt official will choose the Bayesian‐Stackelberg equilibrium over the Bayesian‐Nash equilibrium in order to maximise the expected bribe revenue. That is, when designing the rules of the rent‐seeking game, the dynamic nature of competition will be taken into account.     

Bargaining with Rent Seekers

Consider a rent‐seeking game, which has government bargain with firms over dividing the rents. In period 1, each firm can invest to increase the probability that the rent will appear. In period 2, the parties bargain. In equilibrium, though firms will invest more than the socially optimal level, rent‐seeking expenditures may be low. Firms that collude to restrict investment maximize joint profits by investing at a positive, non‐infinitesimal level, and restrict investment even if the cost of rent‐seeking effort is zero.     

Sabotage in rent-seeking contests

This article considers the interaction between two types ofeffort in lobbying contests: effort that improves the contestant'sown performance (standard rent seeking), and effort that reducesparticular rivals' performance (sabotage). Due to a positiveexternality, sabotage is a 'small number' phenomenon. Sabotagemay increase lobbying efforts and the dissipation rate in lobbyingcontests compared to a situation in which sabotage is not feasible.     

Regulatory Disequilibrium and Inefficiency: The Case of Interstate Trucking

Economic regulation is characterized as (1) an effort by special interests to influence the allocation of property rights, in (2) a continuous path-dependent spontaneous evolution (as apposed to a static equilibrium), driven by (3) market, political, and bureaucratic entrepreneurship in an ongoing discovery process. The implications of the model are illustrated by an examination of the evolution of regulation in interstate trucking. The model is also used to explain that the Chicago School's political-regulatory efficiency conclusions are incorrect, and that the inefficiencies arising from rent seeking are even greater than the Public Choice approach implies.     

Rent Seeking Behavior in Transition Countries: The Case of Romania

This paper points out, in the changing institutional setting of transition in Romania, Some relevant factors influencing economic actors to behave in a way that pushes them to devote resources to unproductive goals, rather than to embark on activities that add economic and social value. The theoretical insights offered in the literature of rent seeking are applied to the issues of transition. A mathematical model of a rent seeking economy is presented, analyzing the influence of interest groups activity on the overall income of the economy. Some examples of rent seeking behavior that severely hamper the economic efficiency are illustrated for the case of Romania. The conclusion is that, in appreciating the progress in transition, the reduction in rent seeking is an important factor to be taken into consideration.     

Rent‐Seeking,Market Structure,and Growth

We study the role of productive and unproductive entrepreneurship in economic growth, in a setting where firms compete in both economic and political markets. Specifically, firms compete for market share through cost‐reducing technological innovation, and they vie for influence over government transfer policy through rent‐seeking activities. We find that rent‐seeking affects growth in two ways: it allows firms to ignore economic competition, leading to less innovation, and it alters the number of firms that are supported in equilibrium. The former effect is negative, while the latter is ambiguous. We show how these effects depend on various characteristics of economic and political markets.     

SEEKING RENT IN THE INFORMAL SECTOR

Rent seeking within the vast informal segment of the developing world is a relatively under‐explored topic in the interface of labor market policies and public economics. Moreover, how rent seeking and corruption within the informal segment gets affected by economic reforms targeted for the formal sector is rarely discussed in the literature. This paper fills the gap. We identify conditions under which economic reform in the formal segment will increase the rate of corruption or rent seeking in the informal sector and raise the pay‐off for those involved in rent‐seeking activities. When the formal sector contracts due to reforms, rent seeking in the informal sector may increase and lower the level of welfare unconditionally. Economic reforms may increase corruption instead of reducing it, unlike standard conjectures.     

Rent seeking and rent dissipation: A neutrality result

We consider rent seeking contests between at least two agents who might value the prize differently. We capture a wide range of institutional aspects of contests by analyzing a class of contest success functions fulfilling several properties. The main properties are anonymity and a condition on the elasticity of a rent seeker's win probability with respect to her effort. We show the existence of a mixed-strategy equilibrium and establish equilibrium payoffs. In this equilibrium complete rent dissipation holds. Our results imply a partial robustness result for the all-pay auction.     

Political Economy of Industrial Development in Vietnam’s Telecommunications Industry: A Rent Management Analysis

This article contributes to the current debate in economics on the uses and benefits of rents and rent seeking. On the one hand, public choice and neoliberal scholars highlight the redistributive and damaging aspects of rent seeking, thus rendering the policy suggestion to completely eradicate rents and rent seeking in an economy. On the other hand, institutional and development economists point out the inherent theoretical inconsistencies shown in the earlier models, and suggest that certain types of rent and rent seeking could be growth-enhancing. Using the Developmental Rent Management Analysis, this article assesses the industrial development of the telecommunications industry in Vietnam using two case studies. Qualitative research points out a number of rent management factors contributing both to the industry’s failure before the early 2000s and its subsequent success thereafter. The successful development of the telecommunications industry was fundamentally based on (i) favorable political support for rent creation, (ii) an effective structure of rent allocation and implementation, and (iii) credible incentives and pressures that encouraged local firms’ industrial upgrading. The Vietnamese experience suggests that rents can be developmental, conceivably side-by-side with rent seeking, cronyism and corruption.