Research

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

Innovate or Influence: Firms Responses to a Greening of Households Preferences (joint with Sonja Dobkowitz and Antoine Mayerowitz)

Previously circulated as "Environmentally-Responsible Demand: Irresponsible Lobbying? "

How do firms respond to greener household preferences? We measure this greening with a novel index built from online search data at the state-quarter level. We link it to patent and lobbying data for the U.S. automotive sector from 2006 to 2019 and infer the direction of lobbying from lobbyists’ political leaning. The index’s granularity permits a shift-share design that exploits wildfire-driven variation in firms’ exposure. We trace average responses over time and compare them with those to fuel-price increases. Behind these averages, and contrary to path dependence, firms with a relatively clean (electric and hybrid) knowledge portfolio raise clean innovation no more than combustion specialists; and only they raise antienvironmental lobbying. A firm’s share of the industry’s clean knowledge can explain both: the more dominant a firm, the more it raises anti-environmental lobbying and the weaker its clean-innovation response. We find suggestive evidence that both responses of dominant firms are more pronounced the more they rely on combustion revenues. We interpret these patterns as leaders protecting their position: environmental stringency pushes followers into clean technology, while combustion revenues make delay cheap. In contrast to the literature, our findings place the substitution of political influence for innovation with the firms best positioned to lead the transition. 

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.

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

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. 

Working paper version