Limiting Anti-Competitive Government Interventions that Benefit Special Interests

Update on special interests and focused practices.

How Special Interests Shape Policy A Survey

This paper surveys recent approaches towards lobbying if interest groups influence the decision of an incumbent government. It describes the two main channels of influence which mainly exist in parallel, namely contribution payments and the transmission of information through lobbying. Recent extensions to the two basic lobbying models are discussed in great detail. Thereafter follows a short o...

Electoral concerns, special interests and illegal immigration

In 2006 illegal immigrants represented four percent of the total number of US residents, and comparable figures hold also for other advanced destination countries. If governments are not able or willing to stick to their “official” immigration policy, why do they set such policies in the first place? The purpose of this paper is to address this apparent puzzle, by developing a political agency ...

Phylogenetic limiting similarity and competitive exclusion.

One of the oldest ecological hypotheses, proposed by Darwin, suggests that the struggle for existence is stronger between more closely related species. Despite its long history, the validity of this phylogenetic limiting similarity hypothesis has rarely been examined. Here we provided a formal experimental test of the hypothesis using pairs of bacterivorous protist species in a multigenerationa...

Social Security's special minimum benefit.

Social Security's special minimum primary insurance amount (PIA) provision was enacted in 1972 to increase the adequacy of benefits for regular long-term, low-earning covered workers and their dependents or survivors. At the time, Social Security also had a regular minimum benefit provision for persons with low lifetime average earnings and their families. Concerns were rising that the low life...