 Moonlighting Politicians: Motivation Matters!Alessandro Fedele and Paolo Naticchioni No BEMPS08, BEMPS - Bozen Economics & Management Paper Series from Faculty of Economics and Management at the Free University of Bozen Abstract: In this paper we study optimal choices of self-selection into politics and commitment once in office of citizens with heterogeneous ability and heterogeneous motivation. Politicians can moonlight, i.e., they can work in the market sector while appointed in parliament. Our theoretical framework shows that high-ability citizens might enter politics. Yet while high-ability non-motivated (market-fit) politicians are likely to shirk, high-ability motivated (public-fit) ones are more committed to the parliamentary activity. We test our predictions by using a unique database of Italian parliamentarians for the period 1996-2006. We show that both market-fit and public-fit parliamentarians are positively selected from the Italian population. We also find that commitment of the market-fit parliamentarians in terms of voting attendance is negatively affected by income opportunities, whilst this is not the case for public-fit ones. Keywords: Keywords: Moonlighting Politicians; Motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bzn:wpaper:bemps08 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in BEMPS - Bozen Economics & Management Paper Series from Faculty of Economics and Management at the Free University of Bozen Contact information at EDIRC. |
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