Policy Influence and Private Returns from Lobbying in the Energy Sector

By Karam Kang. 2016

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this article, I quantify the extent to which lobbying expenditures by firms affect policy enactment. To achieve this end, I construct a novel dataset containing all federal energy legislation and lobbying activities by the energy sector during the 110th Congress. I then develop and estimate a game-theoretic model where heterogeneous players choose lobbying expenditures to affect the probability that a policy is enacted. I find that the effect of lobbying expenditures on a policy's equilibrium enactment probability to be statistically significant but very small. Nonetheless, the average returns from lobbying expenditures are estimated to be over 130%.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb8f71594036564ef983af52f803152856d7e780

Citations in the corpus

• Aggregate and Idiosyncratic Political Risk: Measurement and Effects (2016, unknown): “A few recent papers have used difference-in-difference designs (Vidal et al. (2012)), instrumental variable approaches (De Figueiredo and Silverman (2006)), or have adopted a structural model (Kang (2015)) to address these difficulties.”