Portal: The Rent Frontier

The rent gradient

Land is the clean case: fixed supply, no incentive story to damage, a century of incidence evidence. Every step away from land is more contested, and this portal states that gradient up front so the certainty of the land case never gets smuggled onto the frontier. Resource rents mix a genuine surplus with real extraction incentives. Monopoly and market-power rents may instead be efficiency returns — the same rising markups Autor reads as market power, Crouzet and Eberly read as the return to intangible capital, and the dispute is live. Data and platform rents turn on whether network effects are a captured commons or a produced good. Intellectual-property rents are a deliberately granted monopoly — the clearest privilege on the frontier, yet also the policy instrument society uses to reward invention. And innovation profits are largely quasi-rents that ARE the incentive: taxing them is not free the way taxing location is. That is the Schumpeterian objection, and on this wiki it is steelmanned, not waved away — it gates every claim on this page.

So read the entries below with the gradient in mind. The land-core claims elsewhere on the wiki are stated strongly because the evidence supports it; the claims here are stated attributively — "X argues," "the evidence is contested" — because for most of them the prior question, is this a rent at all?, is exactly what is in dispute.

The anchors

• Economic rent — the definition everything here is measured against.
• Quasi-rent — the Marshallian category that separates a temporary innovation return from a permanent monopoly.
• Corporate profits are increasingly rents — the problem page: moderate-to-strong for the profit rise, contested on how much is rent versus efficiency.
• Taxing quasi-rents kills innovation — the objection that gates this whole frontier.

Monopoly & market power

• Superstar firms and Autor et al. — the market-power reading of concentration.
• De Loecker, Eeckhout & Unger on markups — the rising-markup evidence at the center of the dispute.
• Crouzet & Eberly on intangibles — the efficiency counter: rising markups as returns to intangible capital, not pure rent.
• Kaplow on market power — how market-power rents fit optimal-tax analysis.
• Horizontal shareholding and Azar, Schmalz & Tecu — common ownership as a newer rent channel.

Platforms & data

• Data rents — the claim that data yields a capturable surplus.
• Arrieta-Ibarra et al., "Data as Labor" — the proposal to treat data as a paid factor rather than free raw material.
• Taxing tech rents — the instrument debate.
• Technofeudalism — the strong framing that platforms have become rent-extracting fiefs.

Intellectual-property privilege

• IP rents — monopoly by grant, the clearest privilege on the frontier and the hardest to tax without dulling the incentive.
• Boldrin & Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly — the case that IP monopoly costs more than it rewards.

Finance rents

• Finance's growth is land credit — strong for the composition claim, weaker for "finance income IS land rent."
• The FIRE sector — finance, insurance, real estate as the rent-intermediating complex.
• Philippon on finance efficiency — the evidence that financial-intermediation costs have not fallen despite technology.

AI rents

• Korinek & Stiglitz on AI rents — the frontier of the frontier: whether AI concentrates a new, capturable surplus, and whether capturing it would blunt the very innovation that creates it.

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