Revolving Door Laws and Political Selection

Raymond Fisman, Jetson Leder-Luis, Catherine M. O'Donnell and Silvia Vannutelli

No 33626, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding office. We study the consequences of revolving door laws for political selection in U.S. state legislatures, exploiting the staggered roll-out of laws across states over time. We find that fewer new candidates enter politics in treated states and that incumbent legislators are less likely to leave office, leading to an increase in uncontested elections. The decline in entry is particularly strong for independent and more moderate candidates, which may increase polarization. We provide a model of politician career incentives to interpret the results.

JEL-codes: D72 D73 K16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03
Note: LS POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33626.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:33626

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33626
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().