Politicians' Payments in a Proportional Party System

Heléne Berg

No 7278, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Is politics a lucrative business? The question is approached in this paper, as one of few to quantify the monetary returns to holding political office in a typical developed democracy where parties are the main political actors. By applying a difference-in-difference setting with a carefully chosen control group to rich data on candidates to the Swedish national parliament, both short and long-run effects of being elected on different types of income are estimated. Results show that, yes, mostly thanks to relatively high remuneration while still in office, politics can be a lucrative business. In the long-run however, the effect is instead compositional in the sense that ex-politicians receive more pension income and work less.

Keywords: returns to politics; difference-in-difference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D72 J44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7278

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