get inside the black box of the lobbying process and inform our understanding of the relative importance of these two … views of lobbying. We exploit multiple sources of data covering the period 1999 to 2008, including: federal lobbying … lobbying does not fit the data well. Instead, maintaining connections to politicians appears central to what lobbyists do. In …

In democracies, trade policy is the result of interactions among many agents with different agendas. In accordance with … this observation, we construct a dynamic model of legislative trade policy-making in the realm of distributive politics. An … tariff. The results pose a challenge to empirical work, since equilibrium trade policy is a function not only of economic …

Has lobbying by financial institutions contributed to the financial crisis? This paper uses detailed information on … financial institutions' lobbying and mortgage lending activities to answer this question. We find that lobbying was associated … with more risk-taking during 2000-07 and with worse outcomes in 2008. In particular, lenders lobbying more intensively on …

We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998-2006. Our data … exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii …) lobbying status is highly persistent over time. Estimating a model of a firm's decision to engage in lobbying, we find …

An extensive literature has studied lobbying by special interest groups. We analyze a novel lobbying channel: lobbying … politically motivated spenders of similar magnitude, stressing the economic importance of this lobbying channel. These findings …

. Regulation, tax, and Coasean exchange, such as through cap-and-trade regimes, are presented as substitutes, based on the relative … for the costs of political bargaining and lobbying that arise from implementing and administering government regulation … and tax policies, although these costs have received somewhat more attention with cap and trade regimes. Coasean exchange …