By Max Miller | Posted on 4 April 2022

We provide the first large-sample evidence of foreign influence in US politics, showing that meetings between foreign countries and legislators affect government resource allocation directly for countries and indirectly for...


By Deniz Igan | Posted on 16 March 2022

We study how banks’ special interests affect the resolution of failed banks. Using a sample of FDIC auctions between 2007 and 2016, we find that bidding banks that lobby regulators...


By Thomas Lambert | Posted on 8 December 2021

This paper examines the incidence of special interests in the allocation of loans through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). We find that lobbying at the firm and industry levels helps...


By Stylianos Papageorgiou | Posted on 8 November 2021

In a general equilibrium framework, we study the cost incurred by banks to ''buy" influence on capital regulation via campaign contributions. Our central result is that banks buy influence at...


By Philip Valta | Posted on 13 September 2021

Candidate self-funding, in particular self-loans, is a significant source of funding of political campaigns.  Self-funding clusters among newcomers, Senate campaigns and Republican campaigns.  Self-funded campaigns raise less money from individuals...


By Jörg Stahl | Posted on 23 August 2021

We present novel evidence on the value of cross-border political access. We analyze data on meetings of US multinational enterprises (MNEs) with European Commission (EC) policymakers. Meetings with Commissioners are...


By Orkun Saka | Posted on 17 August 2021

Despite the commonly held views of economists on regulatory capture, our profession has been much more hesitant in recognising similar conflicts of interests that may exist in economics research. This...


By Enrico Perotti | Posted on 6 July 2021

This post reports on recent work presented at the first edition of the CEPR Conference Series on the Political Economy of Finance, which focused on the politics of regulation and...