We use survey responses by firms to examine the firm-level determinants and effects of political influence, their perception of corruption and prevalence of bribe paying. We find that: (a) measures of political influence and corruption/bribes are uncorrelated at the firm level; (b) firms that...

We use survey responses by firms to examine the firm-level determinants and effects of political influence, their perception of corruption and prevalence of bribe paying. We find that: (a) measures of political influence and corruption/bribes are uncorrelated at the firm level; (b) firms that...

We analyze informational lobbying in the context of multi-member legislatures. We show that a single decision maker and a decentralized majoritarian legis- lature provide widely di .erent incentives for interest groups to acquire and transmit policy relevant information. The paper also shows a...

Interest groups can influence political decisions in two distinct ways: by offering contributions to political actors and by providing them with relevant information that is favorable for the group. We analyze the conditions under which interest groups are more inclined to use one or the other...

We analyze how the structure of organizational form of legislative institutions affects interest groups ’incentives to lobby.Lobbying is modelled the strategic provision of information by an interest group to a multi-person legislature.We show that the effectiveness of lobbying lies in...

This paper studies how interest group lobbying of the bureaucracy affects policy outcomes and how it changes the legislature’s willingness to delegate decision-making authority to the bureaucracy. We extend the standard model of delegation to account for interest group influence during the...

We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. The recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies. In contrast, we show, conditioning on a...

It is widely believed and often argued that fiscal, or budgetary, transparency has large, positive effects on fiscal performance. However, the evidence linking transparency and fiscal policy outcomes is far from compelling. We present a career-concerns model with political parties to analyze the...

Do better informed people vote more? Recent theories of voter turnout emphasize a positive effect of being informed on the propensity to vote, but the possibility of endogenous information acquisition makes estimation of causal effects difficult. I estimate the causal effects of being informed...

The paper investigates the effects of checks and balances on corruption. Within a presidential system, effective separation of powers is achieved under divided government, with the executive and legislative branches being controlled by different political parties. When government is unified, no...