This essay identifies the empirical facts about lobbying which are generally agreed upon in the literature. It then discusses challenges to empirical research in lobbying and provides examples of empirical methods that can be employed to overcome these challenges—with an emphasis on statistical measurement, identification, and casual inference. The essay then discusses the advantages, disadvant...

This is the first paper to statistically examine the timing of interest group lobbying. It introduces a theoretical framework based on recurring “structural policy windows” and argues that these types of windows should have a large effect on the intensity and timing of interest group activity. Using a new database of all lobbying expenditures in the U.S. states ranging up to 25 years, the paper...

Though researchers of interest group behavior consistently note that groups often form coalitions when seeking to influence public policy, questions remain about when groups join forces and whether lobbying in a coalition is more or less effective than lobbying alone. In this paper, I approach these questions with a formal model of interest groups coalition formation among information-providing...

Although firms use various strategies to try to influence government policy, with lobbying and corruption chiefly among them, and political institutions play an important role in determining policy choices, very little research has been devoted to these topics. This paper tries to fill this gap. Using cross-country enterprise-level data, it investigates (1) the effect of a key political institu...

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 ...

In developing countries undergoing liberalising economic reforms, there are typically local incumbents facing the loss of protection. Strategic lobbying by such firms for a price-capping regulatory regime is, under certain conditions, one way in which they can deter entry by competitors who are likely to be foreign firms. We show that a regulatory price can be set such that the net profit of th...