An organization must decide which proposals to fund. In evaluating the proposals, the organization may rely on those applying for funding to produce evidence about the merits of their own proposals. We consider the role of a capacity constraint preventing the organization from funding all...

This paper studies the internal organizational design of politicalinstitutions in presence of lobbying. We consider a legislature ascomposed of two bodies: the floor and an informational committee. Thefloor has the (formal) power to choose the policy to be implemented.The policy outcome is ex...

This paper studies the internal organizational design of politicalinstitutions in presence of lobbying. We consider a legislature ascomposed of two bodies: the floor and an informational committee. Thefloor has the (formal) power to choose the policy to be implemented.The policy outcome is ex...

Political activism positively affects firm innovation. Firms that support more politicians, politicians on Congressional committees with jurisdictional authority over the firms' industries and politicians who join those committees innovate more. We employ instrumental variables estimation and a...

Campaign finance contributions may influence policy by affecting elections or influencing the choices of politicians once in office. To study the trade-offs between these two paths to influence, we use a game in which contributions may affect electoral outcomes and signal policy-relevant...

An economic elite wants to buy a public asset as cheaply as possible, whose ownership is decided by an incumbent politician who can be of high or low competence. The elite can exert influence through two channels: they can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer for the asset, and they can manipulate...

This paper presents a model of international trade agreements in which the executive branches of each government negotiate agreements while the legislative branches, subject to political pressure from firms, can disrupt them. Lobbying is in the style of Grossman and Helpman (1994) with a new...

In this article I analyze a model of interest group influence on legislative voting through information transmission. The model shows how interest groups may manipulate voting coalitions to their advantage by crafting different messages to target different winning coalitions. Furthermore, if...

This paper investigates the choice between delegation and centralization within political institutions in the presence of lobbying. Our legislature is composed of two bodies: the floor and an informational committee. The floor has the (formal) power to choose the policy to be implemented whereas...

We propose a general equilibrium model where two special interest groups (SIGs) compete to influence public opinion. Citizens with heterogeneous priors over a binary state of the world receive reports drawn from a continuous message space by a variety of sources. The two opposite SIGs attempt to...