| My dissertation consists of three essays on lobbying activities by special interest groups. The first paper, "Ex Post Lobbying," systematically documents ex post lobbying, the process by which firms allocate resources during the implementation stage after congressional authorization. Previous theories assume all lobbying is done ex ante, where lobbying activities occur before Congress votes. However, my analysis of over 633,731 lobbying reports demonstrates that almost half of lobbying activity from 1998 to 2012, that targeted specific bills, occurred ex post. I argue that the goal of ex post lobbying is to allow firms to bargain over private benefits that will arise from legislation by targeting regulatory rule-making processes that clarify non-specific parts of bills. Ex post lobbying provides a chance for non-participants in the ex ante lobbying stage to claim their share from government policy.;The second paper, "Options for Trade Protection," investigates the effect of partisan dynamics on forms of trade protection. I argue that when partisans are highly divided regarding protection policies, information about favors to special interest groups is more likely to be revealed to voters. Therefore, policy makers deliberately employ opaque and more inefficient policy instruments such as non-tariff barriers, instead of simple tariffs. I provide a simple model for this theory, and by using data on trade barriers on U.S. commodities in the 1990s, I find strong empirical support for the model's implication.;The third paper, "Money and Access: Empirical Evidence from the Foreign Lobbying Registration Act," takes advantage of an invaluable source of contact information from lobbying reports submitted by foreign governments to the United States. I find that democratic countries pay less in fees to their lobbying firms than non-democratic countries, and that there is overall a large premium to a top lobbying firm, which often charges more of a premium to less democratic foreign government clients. I also find that (i) campaign contributions and contacts are positively correlated, and (ii) when controlling for both member and country attributes, past contributions are a much stronger predictor of current contacts than concurrent contributions especially for the House Representatives. |
