Do firms uniformly oppose regulations that increase production costs, or might industry leaders strategically support stricter standards as a competitive tool? We identify a specific mechanism through which large firms strategically support regulations to enhance their competitive position....

We develop a model of monetary policy committee decision-making, building on the framework of games played through agents (GPTA). Interest groups seek to influence policy by offering action-contingent contracts to committee members. The resulting equilibrium admits a simple characterization and...

International environmental agreements (IEAs) often condition entry into force on ratification by a minimum number of countries, yet deep environmental commitments frequently face strong domestic political resistance. We study how IEA breadth, through minimum ratification thresholds (MRTs), and...

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...

This paper analyzes the economic returns to political connections in Brazilian local elections, focusing not only on traditional campaign donations but also on two novel channels: firms that provide goods or services to candidates during campaigns and firms' owners affiliated with parties within...

This Brief studies patterns of political engagement among private firms in the European Union (EU). Using representative data, allowing for analysis at the level of NUTS2 regional groupings (EU regions varying from about 800,000 to 3 million inhabitants), various patterns of engagement emerge....

We study how connections to German federal parliamentarians affect firm dynamics by constructing a novel dataset linking politicians and election candidates to the universe of firms. To identify the causal effect of access to political power, we exploit (i) new appointments to the company...

Economic and social situations where groups have to compete are ubiquitous. Such group contests create both a coordination problem within and between groups. Introducing leaders may help to mitigate these coordination problems. However, little is known about the effect of leadership in group...

Economic and social situations where groups have to compete are ubiquitous. Such group contests create both a coordination problem within and between groups. Introducing leaders may help to mitigate these coordination problems. However, little is known about the effect of leadership in group...

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...

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...

On 1 March 2018, President Trump declared a 25% tariff on certain steel imports by invoking Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. The tariff pitted two of America's most storied and interconnected industries, steel and auto producers, against one another and made allies out of longtime...

The trade war with China has cost US producers and consumers hundreds of billions of dollars since 2018. Yet relatively few US businesses took action to oppose it. This study reports the results of an elite survey experiment on business political activity toward trade policy. Researchers...

Recent trade wars have confronted the trade policy literature with a major puzzle. How can we explain protectionist tendencies in the context of global economic integration? In this article, I aim to provide an answer to the question why, and under which conditions, internationally oriented...

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...

The Society for the Advancement of AOPs Knowledgebase Interest Group (SKIG) is a vibrant assembly of more than 40 international experts focused on advancing the Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOP) framework. SKIG operates through regular online meetings, where two or three presentations per...

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...