Lobbying by Ethnic Groups and Aid Allocation

Inequality, Lobbying, and Resource Allocation

This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They lobby the government for preferential treatment. The government—even if it honestly seeks to maximize economic efficiency—may be confounded by...

The Allocation of Resources by Interest Groups: Lobbying, Litigation and Administrative Regulation

One of the central concerns about American policy-making institutions is the degree to which political outcomes can be influenced by interested parties. While the literature on interest group strategies in particular institutions– legislative, administrative, and legal–is extensive, there is very little scholarship which examines how the interdependencies between institutions affects the strate...

Notes to “ Inequality , Lobbying and Resource Allocation , ”

The ratio in [A.3′] is the factor increase in the cost by an increase in the bidding expenditure by a factor of δ > 1. As wealth increases both costs decrease. Our assumption simply posits that the cost at the higher level of bidding does not fall faster than the lower cost. In particular, this assumption excludes the possibility that the costs of expending δr and r tend to converge to each oth...

Wealth constraints, lobbying and the e$ciency of public allocation

In Esteban and Ray (1999, Inequality public allocation and development, Mimeo.) we formalize a model in which individuals lobby before the government in order to bene"t from some productivity-enhancing government action (infrastructures, direct subsidies, permissions, in short). The government honestly tries to allocate these permissions to the agents that will make the best use of them, as rev...

Racial and Ethnic Groups