The impact of a campaign on voters' decisions depends, in part, on when voters make their decisions. Voters who decide at the start of a campaign will be much less influenced by the campaign than those who decide at the end. But what explains when voters make their decisions? We address this...

Individuals dominate money in politics, accounting for over 90% of federal campaign contributions, yet studies of individuals' giving patterns are scarce. We construct a new dataset to examine all of the contributions made between 1991 and 2008 by all 2,198 people who served as S&P 500 CEOs for...

Using campaign contributions to measure CEO's political connections, we find that a one standard deviation increase in political connections is associated with a 9% increase in CEOs' annual compensation and a 17% decrease in his pay-performance sensitivity. Political rents increase with the...