Corporate Lobbying Revisited

Corporate Lobbying Revisited

Corporate Lobbying for Environmental Protection

Much of the time, firms lobby against environmental protection, but there are major exceptions to this rule. DuPont, the leading ozone polluter in the 1980s, lobbied for a complete ban of its product. In 2015, in the run up to the Paris Agreement, Europe's six largest oil and gas companies lobbied for a global carbon price. This kind of political support is often pivotal for governments trying ...

Interest Group Lobbying and Corporate Strategy

We study corporate non-market strategies designed to influence the lobbying behavior of other special interest groups. We focus on conditions under which costly lobbying is an informative signal to policymakers about the true state of the world, and in which stringent policy is so costly to the firm that the firm is not viewed as a credible source of information. We study three corporate non-ma...

Astroturf: Interest Group Lobbying and Corporate Strategy

We study three corporate nonmarket strategies designed to influence the lobbying behavior of other special interest groups: (1) astroturf, in which the firm covertly subsidizes a group with similar views to lobby when it normally would not; (2) the bear hug, in which the firm overtly pays a group to alter its lobbying activities; and (3) self-regulation, in which the firm voluntarily limits the...

The Corporate Objective Revisited

The stock market convulsions and corporate scandals of 2001 and 2002 have reignited debate on the purposes of the corporation and, in particular, the goal of shareholder value maximization. We revisit the debate, re-examine the traditional rationales, and develop a set of new arguments for why the preferred objective function for the corporation must unambiguously continue to be the one that sa...