Lobbying for government appropriations

Strategic Government Behavior and Lobbying Under Asymmetric Information∗

This paper models influence activity as a dynamic game between special interest groups and a policymaker whose preferences are not known with certainty. In case of a single lobby, in a two—period model I show that the policymaker overstates her benevolence in the first period to build a reputation for being “honest” in order to withhold more rents in the second period. The lobby, recognizing th...

Lobbying against Environmental Regulation vs. Lobbying for Loopholes

We analyze the determinants of environmental policy when two firms engage in two types of lobbying against a restriction on allowed pollution: General lobbying increases the total amount of allowed pollution, which is beneficial for both firms. Private lobbying increases the individual pollution standard of the lobbying firm, but has a negative or zero effect on the allowed emissions of the com...

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 ...

Incrementalism in Appropriations: Small Aggregation, Big Changes

U.S. federal budget dynamics, as a major attribute of the legislative and bureaucratic decision-making processes, increasingly calls into question the scholarly focus on incrementalism. What constitutes a “small” change is largely unspecifi ed in previous research that has also been unable to assess incrementalism across multiple levels of aggregation. Using a unique budgetary database, this ar...

Spatiotemporal Analysis of Prior Appropriations Water Calls