The choice of transport infrastructure projects to include in the National Transport Infrastructure Plans in Sweden is often said to be motivated by the weighing of cost against social benefits. Examining the projects that are included in the Plans, it is clear, however, that not all projects...

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...

A principal must decide whether to implement each of two independent proposals (e.g., earmark requests, policy reforms, grant funding) of unknown quality. Each proposal is represented by an agent who advocates by producing evidence about quality. Although the principal prefers the...

We exploit the precise timing of domestic natural disasters to study the connection between public attention to politics and legislator support for special interests. Our findings show that when a disaster strikes, the news media reduce both their coverage of politics in general as well as that...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to use a unique, hand-collected data set of Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved products to understand the effect of lobbying on the product market. The authors gather total 86,462 FDA labels including drug patents, drugs, pre-market approvals and...

A firm may induce voters or elected politicians to support a policy it favors by suggesting that it is more likely to invest in a district whose voters or representatives support the policy. In equilibrium, no one vote may be decisive, and the policy may gain strong support though the majority...

This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so, we eliminate a potential source of bias in...

We study lobbying in a setting in which decision-makers share resources in a network. Two opposing interest groups choose which decision-maker they want to target with their resource provision, and their decision depends on the decision-makers' ideologies as well as the network structure. We...

This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so, we eliminate a potential source of bias in...

We study the effects of unequal representation in the interest-group system on the degree of information transmission between a lobbyist and a policymaker. Employing a dynamic cheap-talk model in which the lobbyist cares instrumentally about his reputation for truthtelling, we show that the...