See the seminar's full schedule here: Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy
In Song Kim (MIT), "The Effects of Firms' Lobbying on Resource Misallocation"
We study the effect of firms’ lobbying activities on the misallocation of resources in the U.S. through the distortion of firm size. To quantify the macroeconomic consequences of corporate political influence, we develop a multi-sector heterogeneous firm model with endogenous lobbying. We estimate our model using a novel firm-level lobbying dataset, while leveraging the variation in the returns to lobbying expenditures through changes in the value of firms’ connections to politicians. Finally, we structurally estimate the model and show that eliminating lobbying increases aggregate productivity in the U.S. by 6 percent.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
Zoom links for the Alesina Seminar are distributed via the seminar's mailing list. You can subscribe to the Alesina Seminar Mailing List here.
See the seminar's full schedule at the Alesina Seminar page.
All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel room K354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20241003T203000Z DTEND:20241003T214500Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR