Spillovers from regulating corporate campaign contributions

Fremeth, Adam and Richter, Brian and Schaufele, Brandon (2018): Spillovers from regulating corporate campaign contributions.

Abstract

Populist clamor and recent Supreme Court decisions have renewed calls for increased regulation of corporate money in politics. Few empirical estimates exist, however, on the implications of existing rules on firms' political spending. Exploiting within firm-cycle cross-candidate variation and across firm-cycle variation, we demonstrate that the regulation of PAC campaign contributions generates large spillovers into other corporate political expenditures such as lobbying. Using both high dimensional fixed effects and regression discontinuity designs, we demonstrate that firms constrained by campaign contribution limits spend between $549,000 and $1.6M more on lobbying per election cycle, an amount that is more than 100 times the campaign contribution limit. This empirical results demonstrate that, similar to regulations in other domains of the economy, constraining specific corporate political activities often yields unintended effects.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Campaign finance regulation; corporate political activity; election law
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D72 - Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior; D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D73 - Bureaucracy ; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations ; Corruption; K - Law and Economics > K3 - Other Substantive Areas of Law > K39 - Other

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