This paper investigates the effects of business tax lobbying in the presence of investments that are sunk or costly to adjust in the short run. We show that industries which rely more heavily on sunk capital are generally more successful in obtaining tax breaks through lobbying; this reverses the usual logic of the capital levy problem. Nevertheless, these industries invest less in long-run equ...

Are national or multinational firms better lobbyists? This paper analyzes the extent of national environmental regulation when policy is determined in a lobbying game between a government and firm. We compare the resulting regulation levels for national and multinational firms. We identify three countervailing forces, the easier-to-shut-down effect, the easier-to-curbexports effect and the mult...

Using original data from a survey conducted in 2012, we apply theoretical insights from the literature on strategic alliances to explore Brussels-based corporate lobbyists’ perceptions of prospective political partners. We find these perceptions to be driven primarily by strategic considerations. We also uncover instances where the size and nationality of respondents’ firms influence their part...

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide verifiable policy-relevant information to a political decision-maker and to exert political pressure on her. We show that both lobbying instruments are interdependent. In our view information provision is a risky attempt to affect the politician’s beliefs about the desirability of the lobby’s objective. The constraints governing informat...

We develop a positive theory of parking fees or cordon tolls in downtown commercial districts of cities. The model accounts for the special interests of both downtown traditional retailers and superstores at the edge of the city, and it studies how lobbying activities by such groups shapes the government’s policy. Our baseline model shows that central city retailers typically have steeper lobby...

BACKGROUND The South African Vaccination and Immunisation Centre receives many requests to explain the validity of internet-based anti-vaccination claims. Previous global studies on internet-based anti-vaccination lobbying had not identified anti-vaccination web pages originating in South Africa (SA). OBJECTIVE To characterise SA internet-based anti-vaccination lobbying. METHODS In 2011, se...

Lobbying is often represented as a common agency game. Common agency games typically have multiple equilibria. One class of equilibria, called truthful, has been identified by Bernheim and Whinston [Quarterly Journal of Economics 1986;101(1):1–31]. In this paper, we identify another class of equilibria, which we call natural, in which each principal offers a positive contribution on at most one...

The cost of political campaigns in the U.S. has risen substantially in recent years. For example, real spending on congressional election campaigns doubled between 1976 and 1992 (Steven D. Levitt [1995]). There are many reasons why increased campaign spending might be socially harmful. First, increased spending means increased fund-raising, which may keep politicians from their legislative duti...