In this paper, we statistically estimate the returns to lobbying by universities. We develop a simple theoretical model of university lobbying for academic earmarks to motivate our empirical work. We first show that universities that are represented by a House Appropriations Committee (HAC) or Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) member spend more on lobbying. Next, in a later instrumental var...

Firms lobby the U.S. Congress to in uence policy-making. This paper quanti es the extent to which lobbying expenditures a ect policy enactment. First, I construct a novel dataset comprised of federal energy legislation and lobbying activities by the energy sector during the 110th Congress. Second, I develop and estimate a gametheoretic model where heterogeneous players choose lobbying expenditu...

We investigate whether the impact of institutions depends not just on their current state but also on how they came to be. In particular, we hypothesize that while economic freedom that emerges spontaneously may be growth promoting, economic freedom that emerges as a result of costly lobbying efforts may be less fruitful. In an extreme case, costly lobbying efforts may even negate the growth-en...

I business-to-business settings a company’s sales force often spends considerable time lobbying internally for authorization to charge lower prices. These internal lobbying activities are time consuming, and divert attention from other tasks, such as interacting with customers. We explain why internal lobbying activities serve an important role. They help the firm elicit truthful reporting of d...

We extend work by Christian et al. [Review of Economic Design 2007] on lobbying in multiple referenda by first providing a more fine-grained analysis of the computational complexity of the NP-complete LOBBYING problem. Herein, given a binary matrix, the columns represent issues to vote on and the rows correspond to voters making a binary vote on each issue. An issue is approved if a majority of...

Product Market Competition and Lobbying Coordination in the U.S. Mobile Telecommunications Industry* by Astrid Jung and Tomaso Duso This paper empirically investigates market behavior and firms’ lobbying in a unified structural setup. In a sequential game, where firms lobby for regulation before they compete in the product market, we derive a testable measure of lobbying coordination. Applying ...

This paper studies the impact of lobbying on political competition and policy outcomes in a framework which integrates the citizen–candidate model of representative democracy with the menu-auction model of lobbying. Positive and normative issues are analysed. On the positive side, lobbying need have little or no effect on policy outcomes because voters can restrict the influence of lobbyists by...

We provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. First, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Second, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proport...

This paper investigates if multinationals influence the political process through lobbying more effectively than national firms. First, I introduce a model which contrasts a multinational’s incentives for lobbying with those of a national firm. Then the effect of lobbying on the political decision is analyzed. I conclude that multinationals have smaller incentives to lobby because they have sma...

This paper surveys recent approaches towards lobbying if interest groups influence the decision of an incumbent government. It describes the two main channels of influence which mainly exist in parallel, namely contribution payments and the transmission of information through lobbying. Recent extensions to the two basic lobbying models are discussed in great detail. Thereafter follows a short o...