What do lobbyists do? Some believe that lobbyists' main role is to provide issue-specific information and expertise to congressmen to help guide the law-making process. Others believe that lobbyists mainly provide the firms and other special interests they represent with access to politicians in...

What do lobbyists do? Some believe that lobbyists' main role is to provide issue-specific information and expertise to congressmen to help guide the law-making process. Others believe that lobbyists mainly provide the firms and other special interests they represent with access to politicians in...

This paper investigates the relationship between the size of interest groups in terms of voter representation and the interest group's campaign contributions to politicians. We uncover a robust hump-shaped relationship between the voting share of an interest group and its contributions to a...

We explore the role of charitable giving as a means of political influence. For philanthropic foundations associated with large U.S. corporations, we present three different identification strategies that consistently point to the use of corporate social responsibility in ways that parallel the...

Politicians and regulators rely on feedback from the public when setting policies. For-profit corporations and non-pro t entities are active in this process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. Policymakers (and the public at large), however, may be unaware of the...

This paper employs a novel data set on lobbying expenditures to measure the degree of within-sector political organization and to explore the determinants of the mode of lobbying and political organization across U.S. industries. The data show that sectors characterized by a higher degree of...

Has the expansion in exports affected pollution and health outcomes across different prefectures in China in the two decades between 1990 and 2010? We exploit variation in the initial industrial composition to gauge the effect of export expansion due to the decline in tariffs faced by Chinese...

Does opening a market to international trade affect the pattern of matching between firms and workers? This paper answers this question both theoretically and empirically in three parts. We set up a model of matching between heterogeneous workers and firms in which variation in the worker type...

Does opening a market to international trade affect the pattern of matching between firms and workers? And does the modified sorting pattern affect welfare? This paper answers these questions both theoretically and empirically in three parts. We set up a model of matching between heterogeneous...