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

Environmentally-Responsible Households: Irresponsible Corporate Lobbying (joint with Sonja Dobkowitz and Antoine Mayerowitz)

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. 

How Firms Build Their Political Influence: Campaign Contributions as the Key to Successful 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. First, we show that firms lobby committees where there are legislators to whom they have contributed. Second the data reveal a high persistence in contributions between firms and legislators. Last, we find that f irms lobby on the new issues treated by legislators to whom they have contributed after these legislators are reassigned to new committees. Based on these key facts, we introduce a new definition of political connections based on persistent campaign contributions between firms and legislators.We then exploit the strategic links between lobbying activity and campaign contributions to build a new instrument that accounts for the endogeneity of firms’ lobbying topics and provide new estimates on the impact of lobbying on firm size, financial performance and investments.

[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

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