can falling supply explain the rising return to college for younger men a cohort based analysis although the college high school wage gap for younger u s men has doubled over the past 30 years the gap for older men has remained nearly constant in the united kingdom and canada the college high school wage gap also increased for younger relative to older men using a model with imperfect substitution between similarly educated workers in different age groups we argue that these shifts reflect changes in the relative supply of highly educated workers across age groups the driving force behind these changes is the slowdown in the rate of growth of educational attainment that began with cohorts born in the early 1950s in all three countries

campaign contributions and congressional voting a simultaneous probit tobit model m any citizens and scholars have been troubled by the influence that special interest groups appear to exert over policymaking as a result of their roles in the financing of political campaigns these concerns inspired the enactment of a number of election law reforms in the 1970s and have led to increasing popular support for public financing of electoral campaigns despite the public attention these issues have attracted few social scientists have attempted to analyze the financial relationships between interest groups and policymakers empirically 1 one such study was reported by durden and silberman 1976 who included contributions from the afl cio political action committee as an independent variable in an equation explaining congressional voting on minimum wage legislation their results indicated that campaign contributions significantly affected voting on that issue the work i have done differs substantially from that of durden and silberman in two ways first i have chosen to examine issues which were of considerably narrower concern than the minimum wage issue in the interest of simplicity i examine issues of concern to just one or a few groups i have also used a different econometric technique if campaign contributions are actually endogenous as seems plausible the single equation estimation technique employed by durden and silberman is subject to a possible simultaneous equations bias for each issue studied i have therefore jointly estimated a two equation system explaining both votes on the bill and contributions from an associated interest group the simultaneous probit tobit model which i use takes into account the dichotomous nature of the variable indicating a congressman s vote the non negativity constraint imposed on the contribution variable and the possibility of correlation between the error terms for the equations explaining these two variables 2 full information maximum likelihood fiml estimates for the model are consistent and asymptotically efficient

minding america s business the decline and rise of the american economy only the economy s competitive position internationally but also the nation s moral fiber in the liberal camp the present confusion which has arisen out of attempts to reconcile reagan s new federalism with longstanding democratic demands for a large share of public goods in the economy has been camouflaged by the visions of felix rohatyn and lester thurow who want to rebuild america s in

union experience and worker policy legislative behavior in california 1999 2012 unions influence the u s political process in numerous ways although scholarship has examined labor s effects on political office holding less research is available on the relationship between unions and legislator policy choice in this article i use theories of social identification civic engagement and intergenerational transfer of political values to explore the relationship between various definitions of a legislator s prior union experience and his or her roll call voting once in office i employ multilevel mixed effects regressions to analyze 2 427 federal and statewide worker related votes cast by california s legislators from 1999 to 2012 results indicate that higher probabilities of having worked in a unionized occupation or having a family member who belonged to a union are positively associated with voting for union supported issues the relationship is not cumulative however and is moderated by factors both endogenous and exogenous to the legislator

urban unemployment in the eu tertiary sector employment growth and urban size the paper uses regio data to study recent change in unemployment in major urban areas of europe previous results suggested a significant role for tertiarisation in employment and a systematic ass

corporate unity in american trade policy a network analysis of corporate dyad political action this essay examines factors that produce political unity among large u s corporations advocating free trade expanding on old debates these data and analyses validate the importance of organizational and class cohesion approaches to corporate political action methodologically the political unity of pairs dyads of firms in trade policy activism is analyzed with quadratic assignment procedure regression shared membership in prominent policy networks and board interlocks positively predict corporate political unity across three areas of trade policy influence from the executive branch to the legislature non network organizational indicators also significantly predicted corporate trade policy activism the findings support business unity accounts of corporate political action and suggest that higher levels of firm embeddedness within intercorporate networks facilitate collective corporate political action

the effect of cohort size on earnings growth a reexamination of the evidence this study reexamines the effect of cohort size on earnings growth finis welch finds that individuals in larger cohorts experience depressed earnings conditions on entry into the labor market but that their earnings grow at faster rates than in smaller cohorts thus a large portion of the cohort size effect on earnings dissipates after a few years however using data almost identical to those of welch but estimating less restrictive models it is found here that cohort size not only depresses earnings at entry but also seems to slow down early career earnings growth the evidence suggests that earnings ini larger cohorts do not approach normal levels after at brief period in the labor force rather the negative cohort size effect on earnings appears to worsen with experience

a test of the structure of pac contracts an analysis of house gun control votes in the 1980s enactment of the bill was a major victory for the national rifle association which had worked for years to win relaxation of the landmark gun control act of 1968 congressional quarterly almanac 1986 p 82 i introduction every election the same political action committees pacs contribute millions of dollars to candidates for office well informed participants in the political process surely must get value for their money yet empirical research fails to provide systematic evidence that campaign contributions influence congressional roll call votes 1 a mischaracterization of the exchange between pacs and politicians may produce these contradictory results empirical studies of roll call voting typically use pac contributions from only one election cycle earlier studies generally assume prepayment in the prior congress while more contemporary studies assume a spot exchange recent empirical work however suggests another possibility interest groups may buy current influence with money spent over multiple election cycles stratmann 1995 shows that contributions from both the current and the previous election cycles influence floor votes on agricultural price supports snyder 1990 1992 presents evidence that interest groups make long term investments in politicians previous studies by arbitrarily imposing a payment structure may have produced erroneous estimates of the influence of pac money on legislative votes we examine roll call votes on gun control in the u s house of representatives during the 1980s to determine whether pacs make spot market purchases prepay for votes in the prior election cycle or make long term investments we investigate whether pac contributions have a durable long term investment effect as snyder 1992 suggests we consider two types of evidence concerning the campaign contribution contract first we examine the pattern of expenditures by the two dominant interest groups concerned with gun control the national rifle association nra and hand gun control hgc their expenditures provide strong evidence against the spot market exchange hypothesis both groups made significant expenditures in sessions of congress in which no floor vote occurred nor were these expenditures purchasing services such as committee work in a spot market exchange further 1986 nra expenditures are significantly higher for first term representatives which is consistent with long term investments but contradicts a spot exchange since freshmen have the least influence to sell second we include expenditures from both the current and the five previous election cycles as separate independent variables in a model of roll call voting to date no empirical paper tests whether pac money from more than two cycles influences roll call voting and only stratmann 1995 and grenzke 1989 use a model that specifies money from more than one cycle in an equation explaining roll call votes our probit estimates indicate that nra expenditures in the three most recent election cycles and hgc expenditures in the two most recent cycles buy votes the independent effect of expenditures from different cycles suggests that contributions are neither an unqualified one session prepayment nor a spot exchange the influence of nra expenditures two sessions prior to the roll call votes is evidence of a long term investment the literature on the determinants of roll call voting assumes that pac contributions alter representatives votes interest groups might instead simply provide campaign assistance to their supporters to affect the composition of congress stratmann 1991 bronars and lott 1997 if a difficult to quantify variable and thus omitted from regressions signals a representative s true position and interest groups make campaign contributions on the basis of this variable pac contributions might appear to influence votes the pattern of contributions and votes on gun control however indicates attempts by the nra and hgc to influence votes not merely the composition of congress

search sorting and urban agglomeration studies have suggested that urban agglomeration enhances productivity by facilitating the firm worker matching process this article develops a model that formalizes this notion and demonstrates that when firm capital and worker skill are complementary in production urban agglomeration will tend to generate more efficient yet segregated matches as a result not only will local market size be positively associated with average productivity it will also generate greater between skill group wage inequality and a higher expected return to skill acquisition recent data from the counties and metropolitan areas of the united states is consistent with each of these implications

lobbying as legislative subsidy professional lobbyists are among the most experienced knowledgeable and strategic actors one can find in the everyday practice of politics nonetheless their behavioral patterns often appear anomalous when viewed in the light of existing theories we revisit these anomalies in search of an alternative theory we model lobbying not as exchange vote buying or persuasion informative signaling but as a form of legislative subsidy a matching grant of policy information political intelligence and legislative labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators the proximate political objective of this strategy is not to change legislators minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own coincident objectives the theory is simple in form realistic in its principal assumptions and counterintuitive in its main implications empirically the model renders otherwise anomalous regularities comprehensible and predictable in a later section we briefly bring preferences back in examining the important but relatively uncommon conditions under which preference centered lobbying should occur

constituency opinion and pac contributions a case of the national abortion and reproductive rights action league to test whether interest group politics doharm to a representative democracy thispaper simulates congressionaldistrict level constituency opinion onabortion analyzing the relationshipbetween the constituency opinion andnaral s contributions in the 102nd and103rd congresses this paper presentsempirical evidence that naral scontribution decision is influenced byconstituency opinion the evidence however is mixed constituency opinioninfluences naral s decision on who will getits money constituency opinion however does not influence naral s decision on whowill get more money according to theseresults financial representation byinterest groups does not seriously causeharm to a representative democracy but itcan still bias the representativeness tosome extent an interest group may selectlegislators whose districts support itsposition less strongly and contribute agreater amount of money to the legislators

the epidemiology of corporate pac formation 1975 1984 abstract most work on corporate political action committees pacs accounts for their formation or activity level in terms of market concentration and collective action dilemmas subsidiary concerns include the effects of regulatory burden and the firm s internal organization however these cross sectional designs yield little insight into the dynamics of the process results of logit and event history analyses of panel data on 119 u s firms from 1975 1984 show that changes in corporate profitability pac formation by other firms in a firm s board of directors interlock network and the degree of managerial dominance of corporate governance also affect the likelihood that a firm will form a pac analyses also reveal important differences in pac formation dynamics across different types of firms particularly in their response to pac formation by linked firms

committee assignments constituent preferences and campaign contributions committee assignments constituent preferences and campaign constributions the familiar economic model of regulation as developed by stigler 1971 peltzman 1976 and becker 1983 posits an essentially frictionless market process for regulatory policy formation in which a single regulator legislator chooses policy to maximize net support from competing groups in this paper we extend the supply side of this model by considering the effect of legislative institutions and unorganized constituent preferences on the ability of incumbents in the house of representatives to serve specific interest groups we then test this formulation by examining the recent history of interest group campaign contributions to these legislators our theoretical model concentrates on how a legislator allocates time between serving specific interest groups outside his district and serving his constituency we do not model interest group decisions directly assuming simply that they purchase their desired amount of service from the lowest cost suppliers our model sorts legislators by the supply price at which they can serve a particular group this price depends on the preferences of the voters in the legislators district and the productivity of the legislator in producing policy service for each group 1 the empirical section tests the model by examining the pattern of interest group campaign contributions to house incumbents from 1978 through 1984 our regression analysis tends to confirm both implications of the theory first the pattern of campaign contributions from specific interest groups to legislators is shaped by the division of substantive legislative and regulatory jurisdictions represented by the system of house standing committees second voter preferences influence the pattern of contributions by affecting the supply price at which a legislator can offer policy to interest groups legislators with sympathetic or indifferent constituencies are able to offer a lower price and are therefore able to attract larger sums than those with hostile constituencies these results are important for two reasons first the influence of congressional institutions such as committees on policy is not widely accepted while several studies faith levins and tollison 1982 weingast and moran 1983 weingast 1984 grier 1989 and robert 1990 have documented the effects of changes in a particular committee on policies under its jurisdiction this work considers the jurisdiction of only a single committee in each case 2 by examining the linkages between congressional committees and political action committees pacs we investigate whether interest groups act as if committees have power second while the chicago model of regulation emphasizes correctly in our view that policy is the result of vote maximizing calculations and the incremental balancing nature of any equilibrium the model is imprecise about which sets of preferences are most important in determining the levels of policy or the size of changes in policies focusing on committees promotes a parsimonious specification of both the political players members of the relevant committee rather than the entire congress and the pivotal voters committee members constituencies more than the nation determining specific policy outcomes the paper is organized as follows section i reviews some issues on the nature and sources of committee influence in the u s congress the second section incorporates committee assignments into a theory of decision making by interest group investors sections iii and iv describe our data and estimation technique and present the empirical results the fifth and final section discusses some implications and conclusions of this research i committee power in congress legislators differ substantively by virtue of their committee assignments committees in congress and particularly in the house of representatives possess disproportionate power over the policy areas in their respective jurisdictions have the right to hold hearings and recommend budget allocations for the bureaus in their jurisdiction goodwin 1970

what drives the reversal of the gender education gap evidence from germany we study the mechanisms that are associated with the gender education gap and its reversal in germany we focus on three outcomes graduation from upper secondary school any tertiary education and tertiary degree neither individual and family background nor labour market characteristics appear to be strongly associated with the gender education gap there is some evidence that the gender gap in upper secondary education reflects the rising share of single parent households which impacts boys attainment more than girls the gender education gap in tertiary education is correlated with the development of class sizes and social norms

building majority coalitions for sub majority benefit distributions this paper poses a deceptively simple question it asks how can a program or group of programs that provides distributive benefits to recipients in a minority of legislative districts be passed by a majority of a legislative body the answer in the existing body of work on distributive policymaking would suggest that supporters of narrowly focused programs are able to ensure passage of their pet projects by logrolling with other legislators we argue that logrolling is not always necessary to produce majority support for narrowly focused programs the paper considers three institutional mechanisms for building majority support for sub majority benefit distributions political parties interest groups and administrative agencies the conditions that would be required for each mechanism to be employed are outlined descriptive data from the 100th congress are employed to reflect on the relative plausibility of each of the mechanisms with respect to the question of how a program that provides distributive benefits to recipients in a minority of legislative districts can be passed by a majority of a legislative body we reject the first mechanism the party based explanation on the grounds that it is empirically implausible at least in the american case the other two we argue are empirically plausible under certain conditions

declining returns to education in norway comparing estimates across cohorts sectors and over time we examine the role of the norwegian education system in explaining the moderate and stable earnings dispersion in norway estimating earnings equations for 1980 and 1990 we find that returns to education have been remarkably stable in norway also when we compare returns to education across different sectors of the economy our analysis controls for self selection into education by using an instrumental variable technique we estimate separate education earnings profiles for different cohorts to identify the effect on wage premiums of the large changes that have taken place in the norwegian education system the substantially higher level of educational attainment for more recent cohorts does not cet par seem to have a negative effect on educational wage premiums for these younger cohorts jel classification j24 j31 i

industrial restructuring in korea abstract the paper explores some of the industrial restructuring cconcerns facing the korean economy at a time when direct government intervention is rapidly being replaced by functional incentives restructuring issues are descending forcefully on korea as the economy moves through a rapid industrial transition from labor intensive to capital and skill intensive exports problems affecting sunset industries are complicated by stresses on the financial sector the pervasive role of conglomerates in the economy and the worldwide impediments to free trade all these factors complicate strictly market solutions following a discussion of some conceptual and historical aspects the paper identifies key problem areas affecting industrial policy decisions surveys lessons from industrialized country experiences and provides an agenda for future policy reform

labor pac contributions and labor legislation a simultaneous logit approach labor pacs are used to explore the potential congressional influence of campaign contributions from special interest groups pacs of organized labor are particularly useful for two reasons first a set of labor issues are defined each year by the afl cio and so ad hoc decisions about pertinent legislation are not made by the researcher secondly there are measurable traits of representatives and constitutents that may lead to a predisposition of labor support by combining these two attributes a model is developed to investigate the question of congressional influence

educational attainment and cohort size we argue that the postwar baby boom caused substantial fluctuations in both the economic rewards to education and educational attainment over the last 3 decades if substitutability between young and old workers diminishes with education the present value of lifetime earnings for a boom cohort is depressed more for highly educated workers reducing incentives for educational attainment the opposite is true for pre and postboom cohorts the diminishing substitutability hypothesis explains the declines in both the returns to college and college completion rates in the 1970s and predicts a substantial increase in educational attainment for postboomers

what do campaign contributions buy deciphering causal effects of money and votes in the 1987 1988 election cycle political action committees pacs spent 176 6 million on candidates who competed for a seat in the house of representatives what do pacs buy when contributing this money if campaign contributions are rational allocations of a contributor s income campaign expenditures could increase both the probability that the contributor s preferred candidate is elected and the likelihood that if elected the candidate will vote in the interest of the contributor most studies do not find that incumbents expenditures have a significant positive effect on the number of votes incumbents receive 11 14 15 17 29 the evidence that contributions influence congressional votes is mixed most studies find weak or no support for this hypothesis for example kau rubin and keenan 17 find that contributions from businesses mattered in only two of the eight votes they analyzed others argue that campaign expenditures play no important role in the voting decision of congressmen 5 9 12 31 the lack of finding of significant effects of money on votes has been explained with the need for better models to explain campaign contributions 5 however the theoretical developments of for example ben zion and eyton 4 bental and ben zion 3 and baron 2 have not been incorporated in the empirical analysis of the effect of campaign contributions on the voting behavior of legislators empirical models that test this relationship must allow for the endogeneity of campaign contributions for the dichotomous nature of the dependent vote variable and the nonnegativity constraint of campaign contributions most empirical work in this area utilize models that do not incorporate these restrictions in this study i plan to incorporate these aspects of the data generating process into a more detailed model of the effects of campaign contributions on congressional votes of all the reported empirical studies on this issue only chappell 5 uses a model which can properly assess the impact of money on votes chappell finds that campaign contributions do not affect votes in congress when his more detailed econometric technique is used the best test of the theory results if votes have a clear economic payoff to contributors benefits of the votes are concentrated and costs are

the rise of the pentagon and u s state building the defense program as industrial policy state centered theories stress the potential for states to be proactive as well as reactive but the analytic tools developed in this literature have not been employed to examine the most impressive episode of state building in the postwar united states the rise of the pentagon this article examines the bureaucratic resources at the disposal of the pentagon and concludes that high ranking military officers have operated as relatively autonomous bureaucrats case studies of the aeronautics and microelectronics industries provide evidence that the pentagon has implemented a de facto industrial policy in the name of national defense the substantive conclusion that the autarkic pentagon has implemented a massive industrial policy contradicts the view that the hegemonic u s state is strong in the international arena but too weak and fragmented to plan the domestic political economy

trade protection and the role of campaign contributions in u s food and tobacco industries to exert political pressure an organization must be capable of obtaining contributions from its members for lobbying activities for this reason past studies analyzing the determinants of political outcomes such as tariffs such as caves 1976 lavergne 1983 saunders 1980 salamon and siegfried 1977 ray 1981a 1981b have used an industry s structural characteristics such as the number of firms and the sales concentration ratio to account for political activity more recently baldwin 1989 among other economists has advocated the study of more direct indicators of lobbying such as political funding levels and the number of employees supported by private interests the importance of lobbying activity in determining the levels of trade protection depends upon the responsiveness of government to such activity bhagwati 1989 distinguishes two types of government behavior passive behavior and self willed behavior under the first type policymakers maximize political support and will be more likely to respond to lobbying activity 1 however if behavior is driven by self willed principles then policymakers will make choices that reflect the needs of their constituents and will be less susceptible to special interest group pressures viewed from the perspective of an industry that is willing to spend resources in order to influence political outcomes contributions to political candidates can have a facilitative and or a persuasive role 2 under a facilitative role campaign contributions are merely a transaction cost for granting access and enabling the industry to inform politicians about the industry s needs in this case the industry structural characteristics are what lend political weight under a persuasive role campaign contributions are independently effective in influencing political outcomes regardless of the industry s structural attributes combining the latter role with the passive government behavior discussed above gives rise to models of exchange and political investment as in the work of peltzman 1976 concern over identifying the determinants of trade barriers and the role of campaign contributions in particular follow from three considerations the first consideration is efficiency if institutional arrangements encourage lobbying as a means of influencing policy choices then a significant waste of resources may occur through competition in the political arena 3 lobbying therefore may result in a decline of overall economic efficiency the second consideration is the dominance of special interests over social concerns the arguments for protection often include protection of jobs and unfair competition which may differ from the factors that drive the policy decisions such as the strength of special interest lobbying the third consideration is redistributional justice a significant redistribution of wealth may occur as trade barriers increase prices and domestic industry profits at the expense of domestic consumers the objectives of this article are twofold the first objective is to explain the variation of the level of trade barriers tariffs and import quota tariff equivalents these will be explained in terms of industry structure characteristics number of firms seller concentration and geographic dispersion comparative disadvantage and lobbying activities using data from the u s food and tobacco manufacturing industries for the empirical analysis the second objective is to ascertain the role and importance of lobbying activities in determining the levels of trade barriers a novel feature of this article is that it incorporates more direct measures of lobbying activity such as the contributions of political action committees pacs associated with the industries affected by the trade barriers it also emphasizes the need to consider contributions and protection together in order to capture the exchange between political investments and income transfers as shown in snyder 1990

pacs and the congressional supermarket the currency is complex although pacs attempt to influence the legislative process with contributions this research finds little evidence that the contributions of 120 pacs affiliated with 10 organizations affected the voting patterns of the house members who served continuously from 1975 to 1982 in the few cases in which a relationship between contributions and a member s votes is established the analysis indicates that contributions are a surrogate measure of a more important and larger package of support for the member from the interest groups two stage least squares regression models are used to test the relationship between pac contributions and a member s votes controlling for the incumbent s ideology and party and the political leaning of the district interviews with pac officials supplement the statistical analysis

the jeffords effect abstract in may 2001 senator james jeffords left the republican party and tipped control of the u s senate to the democrats this paper uses the surprise event to demonstrate what i term the jeffords effect changes in the political landscape have large effects on the market value of firms i use a firm s soft money donations to the national parties as the measure of how the firm aligns itself politically in this event study a firm lost 8 percent of market capitalization the week of jeffords s switch for every 250 000 it gave to the republicans in the previous election cycle on the basis of the point estimates the stock price gain associated with democratic donations is smaller than the loss associated with republican donations but the estimates are consistent with the effects being equal and opposite the results withstand several robustness checks and the effects appear to persist over time

why is there so little money in u s politics in this paper we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy buying but are rather a form of political participation and consumption we summarize the data on campaign spending and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals not special interests are the main source of campaign contributions moreover we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good dependent upon income and campaign contributions as a percent of gdp have not risen appreciably in over 100 years if anything they have probably fallen we then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators votes finally we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects there is little relationship between money and legislator votes thus the question is not why there is so little money politics but rather why organized interests give at all we conclude by offering potential answers to this question this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

cultural amenities and unemployment in dutch cities disentangling a consumerist and productivist explanation for less educated urbanites varying unemployment levels across urban economies previous studies on the advanced economies have shown that unemployment levels of the less educated are low in cities with high employment shares in the advanced producer services scholars have consistently interpreted this finding according to sassen s polarisation thesis this article confronts this production based interpretation with a competing consumption based explanation which focuses on the role of cultural amenities analysing data on 22 dutch metropolitan agglomerations between 1996 and 2008 it is shown that in line with consumerists notions of richard florida advanced producer services settle in cities that are rich in cultural amenities instead of the other way around as classical labour follows capital explanations imply yet only advanced producer services prove to reduce the unemployment levels of the less educated meaning that the polarisation thesis and not the theory on cultural amenities is a valid explanation for the low level of unemployment in post industrial cities

what is the energy policy planning network and who dominates it a network and qca analysis of leading energy firms and organizations this study examines the structure of the energy industry and the energy policy planning network eppn i use cross sectional director interlocks from 2002 to examine the social networks amongst a sample of the largest energy firms between these firms and the eppn and to calculate relative network centrality measures for the firms i then use qualitative comparative analysis qca to isolate specific combinations of energy firm attributes that are associated with network position i find that the energy industry has several key intra firm interlocks that link dominant companies to each other and that the industry is well represented on the boards of eppn organizations additionally several dominant energy firms provide links between ultra conservative and moderate policy development organizations finally qca models suggest that firms with many employees high revenue and who produce oil are most likely to hold prominent positions in the eppn though above average political campaign contributions offer an alternative path into the network

cohort effects and the returns to education in west germany using a mincer type wage function we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for west german workers born between 1925 and 1974 the main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort experience and possibly also age effects in the returns for women we find a large and robust decline in schooling premia in the private sector the returns to a further year of post compulsory education fell from twelve per cent for the 1945 49 cohort to about seven per cent for those born in the early 1970s cohort effects in men s returns to education are less obvious but we do find evidence that they too have declined we conclude by identifying possible reasons for the decline

public and private sector wages of male workers in germany we analyze several statistical assumptions used in empirical models on public private sector wage structures based on data for germany which contain a large range of background variables usually not available in other studies we investigate the sensitivity of results to various specification and identification assumptions the standard switching regression model is extended to allow for endogeneity of education level experience and hours worked these extensions lead to considerably different parameter estimates we compare conditional and unconditional wage differentials between the public and the private sector for the various specifications these differentials are sensitive to identification assumptions but robust across specifications which do and do not allow for endogeneity of education experience and hours worked

free trade fair trade strategic trade and protectionism in the u s congress 1987 88 what conditions led the one hundredth congress of the united states to enact fair trade and strategic trade policies into law during 1987 88 political partisanship is an important force with democrats supporting and republicans opposing all types of trade intervention otherwise the coalitions of support for and opposition to the various trade policies differ particularly in the senate in that body international business is associated with support for fair trade policies and with opposition to classical protectionism while domestic u s business is associated with support for classical protectionism liberalism is strongly associated with support for fair and strategic trade policies but is not associated with classical protectionism in the house of representatives the long standing protectionist coalition remains an influence few forces in support of free trade remain in u s politics changing international market conditions rapidly affect the making of u s trade policy

is it whom you know or what you know an empirical assessment of the lobbying process abstract do lobbyists provide issue specific information to members of congress or do they provide special interests access to politicians we present evidence to assess the role of issue expertis

pacs lobbies and political conflict the case of gun control previous research has shown that pac contributions from the national rifle association as well as letters and lobbying by handgun control inc significantly affected congressional voting on the firearms owners protection act of 1986 holding constant ideology party constituency characteristics and a proxy for prior position on the issue using data from that study this paper shows that contributions have a somewhat different effect than lobbying contributions from nra were primarily targeted at nra supporters and had the net effect of making the progunners even more so contributions from handgun control while they did not significantly reinforce the proclivities of the gun controllers were directed only at that group at least in this case money appears to exacerbate conflict by contrast the police lobby directed its attention at both gun controllers and pro gunners the lobby effectively induced pro gunners to moderate their position

corporate political donations influences from directors networks motivated by contemporary debates concerning whether directors inappropriately deploy corporate funds for corporate political donations and the limited research into managerial influence on corporate political donations we examine the impact of director influences from a network perspective using a sample of large listed australian corporations and their political party donation activity during 2000 2007 we find that both the professional and non professional networks of directors influence corporate political donations we observe these influences in relation to donations at the federal and state levels and with respect to the choice of recipient political parties

the determinants of industry political activity 1978 1986 c ampaign contributions made by corporate political action committees pacs are increasingly important and controversial in u s elections influence purchasing is often alleged by pundits and campaign finance reform is continually debated in congress in the academy social scientists have analyzed the allocation of interest group monies and have looked for possible impacts on legislation few however have tried to explain the total contributions of economic interest groups we shall analyze variations in contributions across industries and over time with an empirical model based on organizationally constrained profit maximizing behavior we assume that corporate pac contributions in an industry are raised to enhance industry profits subject to the constraints of organization costs and freeriding incentives our empirical work covers 124 industries over five election cycles from 1978 through 1986 both the costs and benefits of political activity vary across industries we argue that the benefits of political action are determined by direct contact with the government as a regulator or purchaser of industry output by government s ability to ameliorate adverse market conditions and by the industry s ability to solve collective action problems without government assistance the costs of industry political action arise mainly from collective action problems because effective political activity often requires concerted action by the constituent firms in each industry we also make a methodological contribution previous studies use statistical techniques that suffer from sample selectivity bias or else force the probability of acting politically to be explained by the same set of coefficients as is the amount of action taken we explain and employ a technique that accounts for both problems the results are consistent with the theses that industries follow investment oriented goals in deciding the amount of political action to undertake and that collective action problems are important constraints on industry political activity we can explain between 60 and 80 of the variation in contributions in our sample first we review existing work on corporate political activity particularly papers examining patterns of aggregate pac spending by industry then we present an organization cost constrained industryprofit maximizing model based on a comparison between an idealized zero organization cost industry and the more realistic case where organizing collective action is difficult the independent variables used in the analysis are also discussed and defined next we discuss the dependent variable and total industry contributions and explain our statistical method then the results are presented followed by a discussion of industry structure and political activity to make clear how our results can explain different contribution patterns we give examples using five actual industries

show them your teeth first a game theoretic analysis of lobbying and presure this paper investigates the choice of an interestgroup between lobbying words and pressure actions in order to influence a policymaker both lobbying and pressure are modeled asstrategic means of transmitting information that isrelevant to the policymaker however only pressure isdirectly costly to the policymaker the interactionbetween the interest group and the policymaker isframed as a repeated signaling game in equilibriumpressure in contrast to lobbying only occurswhen the interest group s reputation is sufficientlylow and always improves its reputation it is shownthat repeated lobbying cannot completely substitutefor pressure and that the interest group may beforced to sustain its reputation through lobbying weconclude that pressure is typically used to build upa reputation lobbying to maintain a reputation

interlocks pacs and corporate conservatism two alternative corporate political strategies are identified for political action committee pac contributions to candidates in the 1980 congressional elections 1 a pragmatic effort to promote a particular company s best interests and 2 an ideological effort to promote conservatism with the use of multiple regression this article examines three theoretical explanations of corporate political strategies the expectations of corporate liberal theory are not confirmed rather there is support for both state structure and interlock theories it is argued that at least in 1980 business political behavior was ideologically conservative which business understood to represent classwide rational interests

policy watch congressional campaign finance reform while campaign finance reform attracts a lot of attention it seems unlikely that such reform at least in it current guise will have a large impact on the functioning of the american political system recent studies have called into question the conventional wisdom that challenger campaign spending is especially effective suggesting that attempts to close the gap between incumbent and challenger spending will have a smaller than expected impact on election outcomes while it is safe to conclude that pacs wield some influence it is not clear that limiting cash contributions will have a substantial effect

the two faces of capital corporations and individual capitalists as political actors widespread access to public records of campaign contributions by corporate political action committees pacs have made these the preferred data for analyzing political partisanship within the capitalist class by comparison data on political contributions by individual capitalists were until recently difficult to obtain and rarely subjected to systematic study important differences are demonstrated between these two forms of capitalist political action by directly comparing the campaign contributions of 592 individual capitalists with the contributions of the 394 major corporations with which those capitalists were associated campaign contributions by individual capitalists follow a logic different from that of corporate pacs corporations are generally more interested in buying influence with incumbents while individual capitalists are more concerned with bolstering the election prospects offavored candidates by providing a more direct measure of capitalists political preferences the analysis of campaign contributions by individual capitalists clarifies theoretical questions that remain unresolved in the research based on corporate pacs variables that elude measurement when corporations are the units of analysis e g ethnicity are shown to have important consequences for capitalist political partisanship

worker turnover industry localization and producer size abstract empirically large employers have been shown to devote greater resources to filling vacancies than small employers following this evidence this paper offers a theory of producer size based on labor market search whereby a key factor in the determination of a producer s total employment is the ease with which workers can be found to fill jobs that are periodically vacated since the geographic localization of industry has long been conjectured to facilitate the search process the model provides an explanation for the observed positive association between average producer size and the magnitude of an industry s presence within local labor markets

political and economic factors affecting agricultural pac contribution strategies public choice describes a marketplace for political favors that could explain strong support for agriculture while many researchers have studied political markets few have examined agriculture this study addresses contributions from twenty six pac aggregates to senators in the 103rd congress using a tobit model legislative attributes such as tenure committee membership and ideology were regressed on contributions overall the agricultural industry targeted nonsenior conservative democrats from agriculturally dependent states in close election races and who served either on the agriculture committee or the agriculture appropriations committee however many differences were found across subsectors within agriculture such as crops and livestock