Increasingly, lobbying groups are subject to transparency requirements, obliging them to provide detailed information … about their business. We study the effect this transparency policy has on the nature of lobbying competition. Under mild … conditions, mandated transparency leads to an increase in wastefulness of lobbying competition and a decline in expected …

I show that lobbying generates negative externalities, which affect non-lobbying companies. When a piece of new … legislation passes in Congress, non-lobbying companies in aggregate lose $1.9bn in market value. I obtain this result using a … novel dataset combining comprehensive information on corporate lobbying activity with congressional activity on bills. To …