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

利益集团试图通过各种方式影响当选代表的决策：向政治候选人提供财政捐款，鼓励公民投票给特定候选人和/或就特定立法问题直接与他们的立法者联系，以及雇用或保留专业说客，等等。就利益集团而言？支出、雇用或留住专业游说者是最重要的政治活动。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颁布的可能性；其次，游说支出的私人回报有多大。拟议的研究将在第110届国会中解决这些与能源立法有关的问题。该项目构建了一个关于能源公司、行业协会和环境组织的游说支出和目标联邦政策的新数据集。数据集的主要来源包括游说披露法（1995）规定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、扩展或废除某种直接影响涉及能源相关业务的公司和市政当局的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，该政策可能出现在多个法案中，这些法案可能还包含其他政策，并据此定义一项政策的最终状态。Pis使用博弈论模型，即从一项政策中获得不同收益或成本的多个利益集团不合作地提供资金，以施加游说努力，以影响该政策获得批准的几率。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，pi关注的政策是公共产品，因为它们直接影响到所有相关方，而不是特定受益人的政策。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是相反的。其次，能源是一个主要问题，传统观点认为，在制定立法时，行业利益高于公众利益。更广泛的影响：在关于游说及其监管的辩论中，游说支出对政策制定的影响程度是主要关注的问题。然而，一项具有代表性的能源问题样本的研究尚未完成。该项目的研究结果将有助于填补这一空白，并影响美国关于游说监管的辩论。

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.