Abstract We study a game with two candidates and interest groups. The groups offer kinds of costly contributions to achieve political influence: (a) pre-election campaign their favourite that increase probability winning the election (b) post-election lobbying candidate affect implemented policy. are first act by strategically choosing prices they will charge if elected. characterise equilibriu...

This paper presents preliminary results on visualizing business and labor lobbying before the U.S. Congress in 1877–1933 based on metadata of witnesses at Congressional committees. It highlights the dominant presence of business representatives even in this most accessible category of lobbying activity.

Do political connections increase bank risk-taking, or do they work as a financial safety net ex post? Using a data set of lobbying activities by US financial institutions, this paper provides empirical evidence that lobbying activities reduce banks’ risks under the presence of government bailouts. First, I uncover from an event study the fact that political connections and government bailouts ...

When faced with a regulatory constraint, firms can either comply, bribe the regulator to get around the rule, or lobby the government to relax it. We analyze this choice, and its consequences, in a simple dynamic model. In equilibrium, when the level of development is low, firms are more inclined to bend the rule through bribery but they tend to switch to lobbying when the level of development ...