We examine how political capitalism can develop within modern states that typically have many types of checks and balances. We first discuss how this can occur through various influence channels: government executive and regulatory agencies, legislators, litigation, the press, and the public...

Using archival material from states, international organizations, and business actors, this paper explores how the Association for the Promotion and Protection of Private Foreign Investments (APPI), a transnational business interest association (BIA), liaised with different international...

Business actors play increasingly important roles in global governance and international regulation. This paper considers how regime complexity influences the roles of businesses and impacts opportunities for business influence on international regulatory regimes. We conducted a scoping...

Many democracies allow their legislators to engage in private employment, but the consequences for parliamentary priorities are still poorly understood. We collect large-scale longitudinal data on outside employment and biographic characteristics for all members of the 18th German Bundestag, and...

We study how strategic inputs-petitions, evidence, and lobbying claims-shape the making and incidence of trade policy. South Africa's International Trade Administration Commission provides a rare, docketed forum where any stakeholder can seek product-specific tariff changes and must justify them...

Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than...

I study how political competition affects the feasibility of free trade agreements (FTAs). I show that the possibility of political turnover creates strategic motivations for the formation of FTAs. Specifically, a government facing a high enough probability of losing power will have an incentive...

A model of endogenous growth is presented, based on productive public expenditures, and featuring some degree of income inequality, and polarization in policy preferences. The main innovation lays in the political process determining capital taxation that relies, both on voting and on "influence...

Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than...

Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than...

I study how political parties affect representation in the U.S. House. To do so, I account for party pressure on the votes of members in an otherwise standard spatial model that uses roll call voting patterns to identify member ideologies. I simultaneously estimate voter ideologies from survey...

Firm-based approaches to international trade have revolutionized the study of trade politics. Corporate participation in political processes is costly, limiting access to large, productive, well-resourced, and often internationally engaged firms. This implies a pro-trade bias in corporate...

Special interest influence via lobbying is increasingly controversial and legislative efforts to deal with this issue have centred on the principle of transparency. In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of the current regulatory framework provided by the US Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA)....

I suggest that simple enforcement and lobbying models may explain how a small minority of dedicated believers (religious fundamentalists, animal rights activists, woke activists, etc.) are able to impose changes in behavior on the majority in a society who do not believe. With this, a society...

The 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis is a watershed phenomenon that reshaped global capitalism. Stemming from the argument that the Crisis was caused by deregulation, this article assesses to what extent the financial industry influenced the legislative process underlying these reforms. The...

Many democracies allow their legislators to engage in private employment, but the consequences for parliamentary priorities are still poorly understood. We collect large-scale longitudinal data on outside employment and biographic characteristics for all members of the 18th German Bundestag, and...

The ability of private interests to influence the political process is an important topic in economics and political science. While some of these efforts appear as campaign finance and lobbying expenditures in the official record, private interests may also engage in "covert" influence through...

How do firms respond to greener household preferences? We construct a novel index of environmental willingness to act on the state-quarter level based on Google Trends search data. Relating the index to firm-level information on the U.S. automotive sector from 2006 to 2019, we find ambiguous...

We examine how political capitalism can develop within modern states that typically have many types of checks and balances. We first discuss how this can occur through various influence channels: government executive and regulatory agencies, legislators, litigation, the press, and the public...