Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: The Price of Power: The Returns to Lobbying in the Energy Sector

经济学博士论文研究：电力的价格：能源行业游说的回报

• 批准号: 1023855
• 负责人: Antonio Merlo
• 金额: $ 0.81万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2011-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1023855&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; Price

Interest groups attempt to influence policy-making of elected representatives through various means: making financial contribution to political candidates, encouraging citizens to vote for a specific candidate and/or to directly contact their legislators regarding a specific legislative issue, and hiring or retaining professional lobbyists, to name a few. In terms of interest groups? expenditures, hiring or retaining professional lobbyists is the single most prominent political activity. The central question is how effective these lobbying expenditures are, especially in two aspects: first, to what extent lobbying expenditures affect the probability that a policy is enacted; and second, how big the private returns to lobbying expenditures are. The proposed research will address these issues regarding energy legislation in the 110th Congress. This project constructs a novel dataset on lobbying expenditures and targeted federal policies by energy firms, trade associations, and environmental groups. The main sources of the dataset include lobbying reports mandated by Lobbying Disclosure Act (1995) and bill information available in the Library of Congress. The policies in the dataset are to create, extend, or repeal a certain federal financial intervention or regulation that directly affects firms and municipalities that are involved in energy-related business. One of the most innovative features of the dataset is that a lobbying target is a policy, which may appear in multiple bills that may also contain other policies, and the final status of a policy is defined accordingly. The Pis use a game-theoretic model where multiple interest groups with different benefits or costs from a policy non-cooperatively contribute money to exert lobbying efforts in order to affect the chance of its approval. This project will contribute to our understanding of the role of lobbying in representative democracy. First, the PIs focus on the policies that are public goods in the sense that they directly affect all relevant parties, unlike policies with specific beneficiaries. This project is the first attempt to measure the effect of lobbying while explicitly modeling the strategic interaction among various interest groups whose positions on a specific legislative issue can be opposite to each other. Second, energy is one of the main issues for which the conventional wisdom is that industry interests have prevailed over the interests of the general public in shaping legislation. Broader Impact: In a debate on lobbying and its regulation, the magnitude of the effect of lobbying expenditures on policy-making is of primary interest. However, a study with a representative sample of energy issues has yet to be done. The results of this project will help fill in this gap and influence the debate on the regulation of lobbying in the United States.

利益集团试图通过各种方式影响民选代表的决策：向政治候选人提供财政捐助、鼓励公民投票给特定候选人和/或就特定立法问题直接联系他们的立法者，以及雇用或保留专业说客，仅举几例。在利益集团方面？支出、雇佣或留住专业说客是最突出的一项政治活动。核心问题是这些游说支出的效果如何，特别是在两个方面：第一，游说支出在多大程度上影响政策制定的概率；第二，游说支出的私人回报有多大。拟议的研究将在第110届国会上解决这些关于能源立法的问题。该项目构建了一个关于能源公司、贸易协会和环境组织的游说支出和有针对性的联邦政策的新数据集。该数据集的主要来源包括《游说披露法案》(1995)授权的游说报告和国会图书馆提供的法案信息。数据集中的政策是创建、延长或废除直接影响参与能源相关业务的公司和市政当局的某种联邦金融干预或监管。该数据集最具创新性的特征之一是，游说目标是一项政策，它可能出现在多个也可能包含其他政策的法案中，并相应地定义一项政策的最终状态。PIS使用博弈论模型，其中具有不同利益或成本的多个利益集团以非合作的方式出资进行游说，以影响该政策获得批准的机会。这个项目将有助于我们理解游说在代议制民主中的作用。首先，私人投资机构关注的是公共产品，因为它们直接影响到所有相关方，而不是有具体受益者的政策。这个项目是第一次尝试衡量游说的效果，同时明确建模不同利益集团之间的战略互动，这些利益集团在特定立法问题上的立场可能相互对立。其次，能源是主要问题之一，传统观点认为，在制定立法时，行业利益凌驾于公众利益之上。更广泛的影响：在一场关于游说及其监管的辩论中，游说支出对政策制定的影响的大小是首要利益所在。然而，对具有代表性的能源问题样本进行的研究尚未完成。该项目的结果将有助于填补这一空白，并影响有关美国游说监管的辩论。