We study the connection between religion and political radicalization in Weimar Germany, where the Catholic Church vehemently warned ordinary parishioners about the dangers of National Socialism. Methodologically, we show that instrumental variables techniques are useful not only for making...

Why do committees exist? The extant literature emphasizes that they pool dispersed information across members. In this paper, we argue that they may also serve to discourage outside influence or capture by raising its cost. As such, committees may contain members who add no new information to...

In Deutschland soll ein Lobbyregister eingeführt werden. Fraglich ist, ob das vorgesehene Gesetz ausgewogene Regelungen vorsieht, um für hinreichende Transparenz in der Einflussnahme zu sorgen. Die vorgeschlagenen Maßnahmen reichen nicht aus, um die Einflussnahme vollständig und aktuell...

This paper presents a dynamic version of the common agency model – originally developed in the trade literature to describe interactions between interest groups and politicians – to illustrate that socially responsible activity by corporations may serve as profit-enhancing by increasing...

Are business associations - private, formal, nonprofit organizations designed to promote the common interests of their members - positive or negative for the economy and overall welfare? Scholars from institutional and organizational economics, on the one side, and from industrial organization,...

I study the capacity of business associations - private, formal, noncommercial organizations designed to promote the common business interests of their members - to support contract enforcement and collective action. Inspired by recent empirical literature, my theoretical framework connects the...

We study the capacity of business associations|private, formal, noncommercial organizations designed to promote the common business interests of their members|to support contract enforcement and collective action. Inspired by recent empirical literature, our theoretical framework connects the...

This paper investigates the influence of the Orthodox Church network in Post-Soviet Russia on individual political preferences and election results. I use the numbers of monks and nuns from Orthodox monasteries operated in the Russian Empire before the Revolution as historical religious markers...

Where does the balance of power lie in a policy-making institution with an external agenda setter, legislators, and lobbies? In a multiple round majority rule game with sophisticated actors, we show that the agenda setter obtains its most preferred policy outcome even if all lobbies and...

Activist NGOs increasingly oppose industrial projects that have nevertheless been approved by public regulators. To understand this recent rise in NGO activism, we develop a theory of optimal regulation in which a regulated industry seeks to undertake a project that may be harmful to society. On...