Mr. Rountree addresses the federal government's multi-pronged attack on health care fraud and focuses on the options available to health care providers who are under investigation by the government. The article proposes three potential responses to fraud investigations, including: (1) lobbying the government for relief; (2) suing the government; or (3) waiting to defend or settle the fraud acti...

Recent empirical work suggests that declining industries lobby more successfully for policy concessions than do growing industries. This paper presents a novel and simple explanation for this phenomenon. It is shown that an industry in decline is constrained in its ability to raise revenue through production and therefore has a greater incentive to protect profits by lobbying for more favorable...

Why are some uncompetitive industry sectors so effective in lobbying for greater protection and support? This paper attempts to explain the lobbying success of these industries in terms of the strategic role of investment in technology as a credible commitment device. By eschewing potentially profitable investment opportunities firms credibly signal to the government that the cost of a tariff r...

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 ...

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of efficient truthful common-agency equilibria ha...