money in politics

The United States has relaxed campaign finance laws over the past few decades. As a result, there exist concerns about politicians favoring special business interests over the welfare of other constituents, such as workers. In a new paper, Pat Akey, Tania Babina, Greg Buchak, and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva examine how the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission affected earnings for firms and workers, as well as political turnover and polarization at the state level.

In new research, Nolan McCarty and Sepehr Shahshahani find that, contrary to the concerns of Neo-Brandeisians, Market et power does not correlate with political power via outsized lobbying.

Pablo Balán explains that family ties provide firms with an edge in collective action that enables them to be politically active through campaign donations, to engage in financial rent-seeking by obtaining subsidized state credit, and to bypass regulation seeking to curtail the influence of business by substituting individual contributions for corporate contributions. Scholars and advocates can benefit from a deeper understanding of organizational constraints to programmatic reform.

In new research, Marco Grotteria, Max Miller, and S Lakshmi Naaraayanan create and analyze a dataset of more than 12,000 FARA filings to investigate the drivers and outcomes of foreign lobbying of U.S. legislators. Their findings can help inform new laws and regulations that improve government transparency and prevent the more nefarious effects of foreign lobbying.

A new paper examines the relationship between the rising concentration in institutional investors' ownership of publicly traded U.S. firms and portfolio companies' political giving....

Do voters still believe that politics can be a source for common-good policies and not just partisan bickering and rent-seeking? With political polarization at...

A new empirical paper explores how partisan perception affects capital allocation beyond national borders, showing that the global investment practices of US institutional investors...

Over the last two decades, the share of senior corporate executives holding national political office has increased in the United States as well as...

A Stigler Center webinar explores what would be the foundations of a political and economic system that might be more resilient to pressure from...

In his book Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, Larry Diamond highlights 10 steps to close existing loopholes in the...