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...

We study the effect of ethnic diversity on local public spending following fiscal decentralisation in a setting where local institutions are salient. Specifically, the latter affects coordination costs and thereby cooperative behaviour across the constituent ethnic groups. Our theory highlights...

How can the West's economic and political polarization be explained? We argue that persuasive lobbying at various levels of government leads to systematic deviations of policies from those desired by the majority. Implemented policies diverge from the majority position despite centripetal forces...

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...

Contests are well-established mechanisms for political lobbying, innovation, rentseeking, incentivizing workers, and advancing R&D. A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases investments of contestants because of the "discouragement effect."...

This paper experimentally investigates the impact of suggestive messages and tipping on a third party's judgment. The experimental design uses a model with three players, wherein two players (A and B) create a joint project, and the third player (C) decides how to divide the project's earnings...

Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a theory of this situation and shows when a small probability that some future government...

We show using a theoretical framework that embeds a voting model in a general-equilibrium model of a rural economy with two interest groups defined by land ownership that the effects of democratization - a shift from control of public resources by the landed elite to a democratic regime with...

Bergbau, soziale Konflikte und Umweltkatastrophen - seit den 1990er Jahren erlebt Lateinamerika einen historischen Rohstoffboom. Welche Rolle spielen die Betreiber der Minen in den Abbauregionen? Wie schaffen sie Akzeptanz unter der lokalen Bevölkerung? Und welche politischen Auswirkungen zieht...

Der Beitrag analysiert den Zusammenhang von Lobbyismus und Medienwirtschaft auf zwei Ebenen. Erstens werden Medienunternehmen und andere Akteure der Medienwirtschaft als Lobbyisten ihrer Partikularinteressen betrachtet und dabei sowohl auf "klassische" Medien als auch auf datenbasierte...

This paper examines whether political connection heterogeneity plays a role in corporate innovation in a sample of all listed firms in China from 2008 to 2016. Our results show that connections with central government officials promote innovation, while connections with local government...

The paper estimates the political connection premium for Italian cities tracked during the second half of the 1900s, when the role of the state in the economy was very widespread. It leverages the peculiar features of the gridlocked political landscape in place between the end of World War II...

This paper investigates how the combination of firm’s willingness and need, defined by ex-ante political sentiment and risk, respectively, impacts lobbying outcomes in political risk mitigation, governance scores, taxation, investor uncertainty, innovation, and fund flows. This combination...

This paper studies the relationship between political connections and corporate compliance with labor protection. Utilizing a sudden disruption of political connections due to an anti-corruption policy, the paper finds that depoliticization improves firms’ compliance with the social security...

Lobbying activities are important to the promotion of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). I quantify the influence of lobbying on ratification probability of FTA by constructing a novel dataset containing all lobbying activities about FTAs in the United States. I setup a contest model of lobbying...