Endogenous Social Connections in Legislatures

Eleonora Patacchini, Marco Battaglini and Edoardo Rainone

No 13845, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We present a model of the U.S. Congress in which social connections among Congress members are endogenous and matter for their legislative activity. We propose a novel equilibrium concept for the network formation game that allows for a sharp characterization of equilibrium behavior and that yields a unique prediction under testable conditions. While the equilibrium is characterized by a large number of nonlinear equations, we show that the model can be structurally estimated by an appropriately designed Approximate Bayesian Computation method. Estimating the model using data from the 109th to 113th U.S. Congresses, we show that social connections are important for legislators' productivities and we identify some of the key determinants of social centralities in Congress.

JEL-codes: D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13845 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Endogenous Social Connections in Legislatures (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13845

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13845

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().