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Is It Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process
Bertrand, Marianne; Trebbi, Francesco; Bombardini, Matilde - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2011
What do lobbyists do? Some believe that lobbyists' main role is to provide issue-specific information and expertise to congressmen to help guide the law-making process. Others believe that lobbyists mainly provide the firms and other special interests they represent with access to politicians in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008836707
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Endogenous Property Rights
Sonin, Konstantin; Diermeier, Daniel; Egorov, Georgy - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013
It is often argued that additional checks and balances provide economic agents with better protection from expropriation of their wealth or productive capital. We demonstrate that in a dynamic political economy model this intuition may be flawed. Surprisingly, increasing the number of veto...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010821832
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Votes or Money? Theory and Evidence from the US Congress.
Trebbi, Francesco; Bombardini, Matilde - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2007
This paper investigates the relationship between the size of interest groups in terms of voter representation and the interest group's campaign contributions to politicians. We uncover a robust hump-shaped relationship between the voting share of an interest group and its contributions to a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005774898
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Making Property Productive: Reorganizing Rights to Real and Equitable Estates in Britain, 1660 to 1830
Bogart, Dan; Richardson, Gary - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2008
Between 1660 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by inheritance rules and other legal legacies. The loosening of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005830552
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Property Rights and Parliament in Industrializing Britain
Bogart, Daniel; Richardson, Gary - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2010
During Britain's industrialization, Parliament operated a forum where rights to land and resources could be reorganized. This venue enabled landholders and communities to exploit economic opportunities that could not be accommodated by the inflexible rights regime inherited from the past. In...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008610965
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Theory, General Equilibrium and Political Economy in Development Economics
Acemoglu, Daron - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2010
I discuss the role of economic theory in empirical work in development economics with special emphasis on general equilibrium and political economy considerations. I argue that economic theory plays (should play) a central role in formulating models, estimates of which can be used for...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008627143
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Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances?
Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James Alan; Torvik, Ragnar - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2011
influence or bribe politicians, and when inequality and potential taxes are high (which makes redistribution more valuable to …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009220651
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Voting to Tell Others
DellaVigna, Stefano; list, john; Malmendier, Ulrike; … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014
Why do people vote? We argue that social image plays a significant role in explaining turnout: people vote because others will ask. The expectation of being asked motivates turnout if individuals derive pride from telling others that they voted, or feel shame from admitting that they did not...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010796694
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Letter Grading Government Efficiency
Chong, Alberto; La Porta, Rafael; Lopez-de-Silanes, … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012
We mailed letters to non-existent business addresses in 159 countries (10 per country), and measured whether they come back to the return address in the US and how long it takes. About 60% of the letters were returned, taking over 6 months, on average. The results provide new objective...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010798416
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The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism
Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James Alan - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014
, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We …, the gap between the interest rate and the growth rate, does not appear to explain historical patterns of inequality … (especially, the share of income accruing to the upper tail of the distribution). We then use the histories of inequality of South …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011168695