Corporate lobbying, political connections, and the bailout of banks

Wharton-SMU Research Center Corporate Transparency and Political Connections

In this paper, we study the corporate transparency choices of firms operating in a weak institutional environment. We argue that in relationship-based systems, high levels of corporate transparency and strong political connections are alternative means to create firm value. Firms can try to commit to more transparency by issuing securities abroad. However, the expanded disclosures and additiona...

Corporate Lobbying Revisited

Political institutions , lobbying and corruption

Although firms use various strategies to try to influence government policy, with lobbying and corruption chiefly among them, and political institutions play an important role in determining policy choices, very little research has been devoted to these topics. This paper tries to fill this gap. Using cross-country enterprise-level data, it investigates (1) the effect of a key political institu...

Political Networks, Ideology and Lobbying

We study lobbying with information in a setting where politicians are connected through a network describing information flows. There are two opposing lobby groups, who choose which politician to address. The decision depends on the ideological bias of politicians as well as the overall network structure. We show that there is an interplay between the strength of the network, as given by the in...

Caps on Political Lobbying

The cost of political campaigns in the U.S. has risen substantially in recent years. For example, real spending on congressional election campaigns doubled between 1976 and 1992 (Steven D. Levitt [1995]). There are many reasons why increased campaign spending might be socially harmful. First, increased spending means increased fund-raising, which may keep politicians from their legislative duti...