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This paper employs a novel data set on lobbying expenditures to measure the degree of within-sector political organization and to explore the determinants of the mode of lobbying and political organization across U.S. industries. The data show that sectors characterized by a higher degree of competition (more substitutable products and a lower concentration of production) tend to lobby more together (through a sector-wide trade association), while sectors with higher concentration and more differentiated products lobby more individually. The paper proposes a theoretical model to interpret the empirical evidence. In an oligopolistic market, firms can benefit from an increase in their product-specific protection measure, if they can raise prices and profits. They find it less profitable to do so in a competitive market where attempts to raise prices are more likely to reduce profits. In competitive markets firms are therefore more likely to lobby together thereby simultaneously raising tariffs on all products in the sector.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Insurgency and guerrilla warfare impose enormous socioeconomic costs and often persist for decades. This paper studies the detection of unobserved coalitions of insurgent groups in conflict areas, and their main socioeconomic determinants. We present a novel methodology based on daily geocoded incident-level data on insurgent attacks, and provide an application in the context of the Afghan conflict during the 2004-2009 period. We show statistically that the Afghani Taliban are not an umbrella coalition, but rather a highly unified group, and that their span of control has grown substantially beyond ethnic Pashtun areas post-2007.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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This paper presents and structurally estimates a model of endogenous network formation and legislative activity of career-motivated politicians. Employing data on socialization and legislative effort of members of the 105th-110th U.S. Congresses, our model reconciles a set of empirical regularities, including: recent trends in Congressional productivity; the complementarity of socialization processes and legislative activities in the House of Representatives; substantial heterogeneity across legislators in terms of effort and success rate in passing specific legislation. We avoid taking the social structure of Congress as exogenously given and instead embed it in a model of endogenous network formation useful for developing relevant counterfactuals, including some pertinent to the congressional emergency response to the 2008-09 financial crisis. Our counterfactual analysis further demonstrates how to empirically identify the specific equilibrium at play within each Congress among the multiple equilibria typically present in this class of games.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie