Due to their covert and often dubious nature, corporate political activities may encourage or facilitate opportunistic behaviors. Yet, they also subject firms to heightened visibility, which brings greater public and regulatory scrutiny. Using a hand-collected data set of politically connected...

This paper develops a political-economic model of fiscal policy one in which" government resources are a common property' out of which interest groups can finance" expenditures on their preferred items. This setup has striking macroeconomic implications. " First, fiscal deficits and debt...

The US sugar program has long delivered significant subsidies to a concentrated group of sugar growers at the expense of American consumers. In 2013, however, an amendment in the House of Representatives attempted to seriously reduce those subsidies. The amendment narrowly lost. A similar...

We examine the effects of the interaction between lobbying and legislative bargaining on policy formation. Two systems are considered: a US-style congressional system and a European-style parliamentary system. First, we show that the policies generated are not intermediate between policies that...

For the years 2009-2018, we find that fossil fuel firms are more likely to lobby and that lobbying expenditures are greater with increases in a firm’s vulnerability to climate change news risk. The industry’s resistance to a timely low-carbon transition has spawned a divestment movement that...

Senior leadership at many organizations engages in overt corporate political activism (CPA), defined as activities that are visible to stakeholders that support or undermine issues viewed as politically charged. According to media accounts, consumers, employees and shareholders want executives...

We study investors’ preferences for corporate political connections in the U.S. using a novel measure; shareholder votes given to individual directors. We find that, after fully accounting for all firm-year specific information and a wide range of director characteristics, that politically...

Anti-competitive lobbying by incumbents is widely believed to discourage entrepreneurship. In which case, why is there no robust cross-country evidence of a relationship between lobbying and entrepreneurship? To resolve this puzzle we propose a voting model in which social returns from...