Politicians' Outside Earnings and Electoral Competition

Johannes Becker, Andreas Peichl and Johannes Rincke ()

Discussion Papers in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. We propose a simple theoretical model with politicians facing a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The model has a testable implication stating that the amount of time spent on outside work is negatively related to the degree of electoral competition. We test this implication using a new dataset on outside earnings of members of the German federal assembly. Taking into account the potential endogeneity of measures of political competition that depend on past election outcomes, we find that politicians facing low competition have substantially higher outside earnings.

Keywords: Outside earnings; Electoral competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J22 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-03-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Politicians’ outside earnings and electoral competition (2009)
Working Paper: Politicians' outside earnings and electoral competition (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lmu:muenec:2206

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