RENT-SEEKING AND POLITICAL TENURE - FIRST ESTIMATES

This paper computes a measure of rent-seeking based on costs of tenure . Within a political tenure type model, a new incumbency variable is i ntroduced and a variant to existing datasets is presented. Consistent ML rent-seeking estimates are computed for our sample of OECD democrac ies. The statistical advances in limited dependent variable models in particular, the decomposition of the Tobit estimates enabled us to com pute rent-seeking estimates as costs of tenure the Tobit partial deriv atives and to compute the impact of explanatory variables on the proba bility of being above the limit which we interpret as the probability of tenure.