| n this dissertation, I study the effect of lobbying on policy choices by the United States Congress. To what extent do lobbying expenditures affect the probability that a policy is enacted? What are the private returns from lobbying expenditures? In answering these questions, I focus on energy policies in the U.S. and investigate to what extent lobbying activities by the major energy firms affect the probability individual energy policies become law.;One of the major innovations in this research is that I construct a novel dataset on all energy policies considered by the 110th Congress (2007–2008) and lobbying activities on these policies by the energy sector. This dataset has two unique features. First, it focuses on specific policy issues rather than entire pieces of legislation (bills). This feature is designed to take into account that a bill may contain multiple, heterogeneous policy issues, which may move across different bills, and firms may care about only a part of the bill, not the entire bill. Second, I take advantage of the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act. The descriptions on the various data sources and the definition and the summary statistics of the variables in the dataset can be found in Chapter 2.;To study the effect of lobbying expenditures on the enactment of a policy, I specify a game-theoretical model where multiple interest groups spend lobbying expenditures to affect the equilibrium probability that a policy becomes a law. I estimate this lobbying game using the dataset, and I find that the effect of lobbying expenditures on a policy's equilibrium enactment probability is very small. However, the average returns from lobbying expenditures are estimated to be over 100%. As the average value of a policy is estimated quite large, specifically over... |
