On the cost of rent-seeking by government bureaucrats in a Real-Business-Cycle framework

Aleksandar Vasilev

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between rent-seeking behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill, which is taken to represent the rent component. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals competing for a larger share of those public funds. The rent-seeking extraction technology in the government administration is modeled as in Murphy et al. (1991) and incorporated in an otherwise standard Real-Business-Cycle (RBC) framework with public sector. The model is calibrated to German data for the period 1970-2007. The main findings are: (i) Due to the existence of a significant pub- lic sector wage premium and the high public sector employment, a substantial amount of working time is spent rent-seeking, which in turn leads to significant losses in terms of output; (ii) The measures for the rent-seeking cost obtained from the model for the major EU countries are highly-correlated to indices of bureaucratic inefficiency; (iii) Under the optimal fiscal policy regime,steady-state rent-seeking is smaller relative to the exogenous policy case, as the government chooses a higher public wage premium, but sets a much lower public employment, thus achieving a decrease in rent-seeking.

Keywords: rent-seeking; bureaucracy; public employment; government wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E32 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/142339/1/rentseeking.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: On the cost of rent-seeking by government bureaucrats in a Real-Business-Cycle framework (2013)
Working Paper: On the cost of rent-seeking by government bureaucrats in a Real-Business-Cycle framework (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:142339

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().