Research projects
Research projects
This paper examines the effect of anti-corruption law on firm outcomes. Exploiting the dual-threshold regulatory design of the 2016 French Sapin II law which applies only to firms exceeding 500 employees and €100 million in turnover. I employ a multidimensional regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect on subsidiary-level outcomes. I find that subsidiaries of treated parent firms experience a decline of 14 percent in revenue, coupled with higher cash flow and a decline in total assets. Taken together, these results are consistent with a reputational mechanism in which increased practices to curb corruption reshape supplier and client relationships, reducing revenues among exposed subsidiaries.
Corporate lobbying is often perceived as a profit-generating activity. In this paper, we investigate whether corporate lobbying yields benefits for lobbying firms in terms of revenuesand profits. We exploit the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union as a source of variation in firms’ political connections. We construct a dataset of lobbying firms by combining financial data from Orbis (2010–2024) with lobbying status from the EU Transparency Register. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design with switching treatment, we find that lobbying firms experience temporary financial gains when their home country holds the Presidency of the Council. On average, operating revenues rise by about 20 percent and total assets by about 18 percent during this period. These gains, however, do not translate into higher profitability: lobbying firms are not statistically more profitable than comparable non-lobbying firms. The results are robust to several placebo and sensitivity tests, including randomized country rotations and alternative timing of the Presidency, suggesting that the observed revenue increases are linked to temporary access advantages rather than lasting performance improvements.
We examine the influence of lobbying through meetings between Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and interest groups during the legislative procedure. Using the Transparency Register, we combine meeting data with amendments proposed for the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Employing a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) to classify the legal orientation of amendments, we find that gatekeeper firms exert their strongest influence on online platform provisions, where each additional meeting increases the probability of a platform-favourable amendment by 3.1 percentage points. Their influence on gatekeeper provisions is instead channeled indirectly through trade associations, which raise the probability of gatekeeper-favourable amendments by 1.8 percentage points. Public actors systematically shift outcomes away from gatekeepers and toward consumers, while NGOs, despite frequent meetings, show little measurable impact.
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