Andrew Hall (Alesina Seminar)

Andrew Hall (Stanford), "Investing in Political Expertise: The Remarkable Scale of Corporate Policy Teams"

Abstract

In this paper, we define and measure a previously unstudied channel by which companies react to, and attempt to shape, politics: internal policy teams. We use the text of more than 100,000 job listings to classify the roles of roughly 100 million workers, identifying more than 250,000 individuals working in policy roles in the US. We estimate that policy teams are—very roughly—13 times larger in size than lobbying teams, on average, and are increasing in size relative to lobbyists and other corporate positions over the last two decades. Policy teams and lobbyists appear to be complements; both across firms and within, increases in lobbying predict increases in policy team size. But policy team members are quite different from lobbyists: they are much less likely to have previous government experience, and they are less balanced in terms of their partisanship. Taken together, our findings show that corporations invest far more in politics than previously recognized, and suggest that a significant part of this investment goes towards developing internal expertise and communicating with a broader set of policymakers and policy-adjacent actors, rather than towards quid-pro-quo lobbying.