Embedded Files
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
From Ballots to Business: How Legislative Elections Fuel Entrepreneurial Success in Switzerland (joint with Malka Guillot)
Family Businesses and Green Innovation in French Firms (joint with Elodie Andrieu)
Working Papers
Working Papers
How do firms respond to rising environmental concerns of consumers? We investigate this question for the automotive industry in the US using a shift-share instrumental variable approach. We construct a novel dataset at the firm-level to instrument changes in household preferences with natural disasters. Our findings suggest that firms not only engage in cleaner innovation but also increase their lobbying on environmental topics. We show that the increase in environmental lobbying and clean patenting follow the same dynamics which points to a complementarity between the two strategies. These results can be understood as firms using lobbying to increase the value of clean patents: higher environmental standards tailored to the firm's new clean technologies diminish the competition the firm faces.
Long Term Political Connections and the Returns to Corporate Lobbying (joint with Elodie Andrieu)
How do firms build their political influence? We shed light on the complementarity between firms electoral campaign contributions and their lobbying activity through three stylized facts. Firms lobby committees where they have contributed to legislators' campaigns; contributions are highly persistent, even after committee reassignments; and firms follow reassigned legislators onto new lobbying topics. We exploit these facts to construct a shift-share instrument for lobbying expenditures in which political connections are defined by persistent campaign contributions and exposure is measured at the legislator-firm level through predetermined contribution shares. We validate the instrument by showing that reassignments have no effect on connected firms that do not lobby, and that future contributions carry no predictive power. Our IV estimates indicate that a 10 percent increase in lobbying raises sales by around 1.1 percent and capital expenditures by 1.4 percent for publicly traded U.S. firms over the period 2000–2016.
[Draft available upon request]
2023 European Association of Law and Economics Young Economist Award
Innovation or lobbying: who chooses what against foreign competition?
This paper studies the relationship between competition and firms’ political influence. I use the China shock identification strategy to assess the impact of rising imports over the last two decades on U.S. corporate lobbying. The empirical results are the following : i) the increase in foreign competition has brought firms to increase their lobbying effort by approximately 28 percent per four-year period, ii) results are heterogeneous and the increase is focused on low productivity firms, iii) this increase does not target trade policies specifically but rather a variety of topics contributing to firms’ competitiveness. I comment two mechanisms : first, firms for which innovation is too expensive naturally increase their lobbying effort in proportion to the threat of competition, and second, exit from the less competitive firms and innovation from the most competitive ones concentrate the lobbying effort on fewer firms, decreasing free-riding in lobbying.
Publications
Publications
Lobbying Behind the Frontier (with Matilde Bombardini and Francesco Trebbi) in U. Akcigit and J. Van Reenen, (eds.) The Economics of Creative Destruction, Harvard University Press, 2023.
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