We argue that anti-corruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anti-corruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining...

Business and politician interaction is pervasive but has mostly been analysed with a binary approach. Yet the network dimensions of such connections are ubiquitous. We use a unique dataset for seven economies that documents politically exposed persons (PEPs) and their links to companies,...

We argue that anticorruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anticorruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining...

Political connections between firms and autocratic regimes are not secret and often even publicly displayed in many developing economies. We argue that tying a firm's available rent to a regime's survival acts as a credible commitment forcing entrepreneurs to support the government and to exert...

In the United States, the term “crony capitalism” refers to a political-economic system that resembles traditional political “corporatism.” As used here, it describes a system in which government, big business, and powerful interest groups (especially labor unions) work together to...

We study the rent-seeking behaviour of political parties in a proportional representation system, where the final policy choice of the parliament is a weighted average of parties' policy positions, weights being their vote shares. We nd that parties' policy preferences and their rent levels are...

Government or company decisions on whom to hire are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resources and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts or positions that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is ruled out,...