演講者簡介 : Dr. Chaturvedi received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Irvine in 2017. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Columbia Business School, New York. Her research interests are Development Economics, Political Economy, and Economics of Education.
演講摘要 : Social scientists have argued that inequality fosters rent seeking and that rent seeking is likely to reinforce existing inequalities. In this paper, I formalize these interactions by modeling rent seeking in an unequal endowment economy where agents can choose to be rentiers or not. I find that when the cost of rent seeking is exogenous, more inequality fosters a greater proportion of rentiers, which in turn further skews the distribution of resources. I endogenize the cost of rent seeking by assuming that the rentiers pay the cost to a central institution, which chooses the cost per rentier to maximize its revenue. In this setting, the revenue-optimizing cost of rent seeking per rentier increases with more inequality, which results in a lower proportion of rentiers. However, ex-post inequality still increases. The results show how economies can end up with persistent inequality in the presence of rent seeking.
