The Returns to Lobbying: Evidence from Local Governments in the “Age of Earmarksâ€

Steven Gordon

Public Finance Review, 2019, vol. 47, issue 5, 893-924

Abstract: I measure the returns to lobbying for US local governments in terms of federal earmarks. Because a local government’s decision to lobby may be endogenous to receiving an earmark, I instrument for lobbying with local housing prices. Since the time period of my analysis covers the Housing Crisis, I argue that the variation in housing prices over this time was largely exogenous to federal earmark distributions. The strong correlation that I find between housing price growth rates and lobbying provides evidence that local governments lobbied to buffer against impending property tax losses. I find no evidence that lobbying is associated with increased earmark awards overall. However, conditional on selection into receiving an earmark, I do find evidence that lobbying served to increase the size of earmark awards.

Keywords: lobbying; public finance; earmarks; political economy; intergovernmental grants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1091142119852139 (text/html)

Related works:
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:sae:pubfin:v:47:y:2019:i:5:p:893-924

DOI: 10.1177/1091142119852139

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Public Finance Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().