Private Politics and Public Regulation

Georgy Egorov and Bard Harstad

The Review of Economic Studies, 2017, vol. 84, issue 4, 1652-1682

Abstract: Public regulation is increasingly facing competition from “private politics” in the form of activism and corporate self-regulation. However, its effectiveness, welfare consequences, and interaction with public regulation are poorly understood. This article presents a unified dynamic framework for studying the interaction between public regulation, self-regulation, and boycotts. We show that the possibility of self-regulation saves on administrative costs, but also leads to delays. Without an active regulator, firms self-regulate to preempt or end a boycott and private politics is beneficial for activists but harmful for firms. With an active regulator, in contrast, firms self-regulate to preempt public regulation and private politics is harmful for activists but beneficial for firms. Our analysis generates a rich set of testable predictions that are consistent with the rise of private politics over time and the fact that there is more self-regulation and activism in the U.S., while public regulation continues to be more common in Europe.

Keywords: Private politics; boycotts; war of attrition; activism; regulation; self-regulation; corporate social responsibility; D78; L31; L51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdx009 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Private Politics and Public Regulation (2015)
Working Paper: Private Politics and Public Regulation (2013)
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:oup:restud:v:84:y:2017:i:4:p:1652-1682.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().