We develop a model of interest group influence in the presence of repeated electoral competition. In each period of the game, an interest group attempts to “buy” an incumbent’s policy choice, and a voter chooses whether to replace the incumbent with an unknown challenger. The voter faces a tension between retaining good politician types and rewarding past performance. The model predicts that “a...

The chief contribution of economics toward improving understanding of the way the world works is probably the theory of price. This theory has proven to be a robust tool for explaining how human behaviorresponds tochanges in constraints facing individuals. Price theory may not be the most glamorous or technically demanding body of theory in economics, but it is likely the most fundamental. Econ...

This paper provides preliminary evidence that interest groups reduce both the level and the volatility of returns on a national stock market. These findings are robust to model specifications that include traditional growth regression “policy” variables as well as political, economic, and financial institutions variables. The estimated magnitude of the relationship between interest group activi...

Mancur Olson’s institutional sclerosis hypothesis may be evident in the effects of interest groups on investment in physical capital. To test this proposition, we use cross sectional data on 42 countries for which information on the number of interest groups is available to estimate the effect of those groups on the share of GDP that goes into physical investment. The results indicate that inte...

The analytical foundation to existing theories of inflation ignores a very important aspect of the political reality in democracies: public policies can create special interest groups who compete against each other to influence public policies. Inflation being a public good and having large and concentrated effects, the formation of special interests groups is very likely. Since rent-seeking ac...

Article history: Received 2 February 2009 Received in revised form 1 November 2009 Accepted 13 December 2009 Available online 22 December 2009 We investigate the relationship between interest group activity and investment by analyzing an unbalanced panel of observations on 126 countries over three time periods. We find that the number of interest groups in a nation is negatively related to inve...

Despite the establishment of the National Health System in Greece in the early 1980s, the institutional framework remained largely unchanged due to opposition from interest groups and large set-up costs, thus allowing the powerful stakeholders to preserve their privileges. Not until almost two decades later was reform attempted in order to rationalise and modernise purchasing and delivery. The ...

INTRODUCTION Although rural medicine interest groups (RMIGs) are prevalent in Canadian medical schools, there is little research on their contribution to rural education, training and careers. METHODS We explored 2 broad questions by means of an electronic survey to people who were RMIG participants at McMaster University from 2002 to 2007: 1) What are the experiences of undergraduate trainee...

Renewable electricity development has taken different paths across countries. With few exceptions, the recent literature has focused on different policy frameworks for renewable energy development, for example, the differences between feed-in tariffs (FIT) and renewable portfolio standards (RPS). This study brings politics back in to the study of renewable energies. Feed-in tariffs, renewable p...