Tax-Exempt Lobbying: Corporate Philanthropy as a Tool for Political Influence
By Marianne Bertrand, M. Bombardini, Raymond J. Fisman, Francesco Trebbi. The American Economic Review, 2020
230 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We explore the role of charitable giving as a means of political influence. For philanthropic foundations associated with large US corporations, we present three different identification strategies that consistently point to the use of corporate social responsibility in ways that parallel the strategic use of political action committee (PAC) spending. Our estimates imply that 6.3 percent of corporate charitable giving may be politically motivated, an amount 2.5 times larger than annual PAC contributions and 35 percent of federal lobbying. Absent of disclosure requirements, charitable giving may be a form of corporate political influence undetected by voters and subsidized by taxpayers. (JEL D22, D64, D72, L31)
Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb80e08bb6c2a5e5a3147d66d658df6567897f56
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In Sociology and Political Science
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Citations in the corpus
- Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948-2020 (2021, background): “…representation and the distortion of politicians’ and legislators’ beliefs toward their most privileged constituencies: see Adams and Ezrow (2009); Gilens (2012); Bonica et al. (2013); Gilens and Page (2014); Kuhner (2014); Bartels (2017); Bertrand et al. (2020); Cagé (2020); Pereira (2021).”