Essays on strategic advocacy and influence in rulemaking

Politicians and regulators rely on external expertise when setting policies, providing an opportunity for interest groups to influence government policy with persuasive information. This process forms the foundation of many models of lobbying and special interest politics, but is very difficult to study empirically. I use data from U.S. Federal rulemaking process to create new measures of influence, revealing that U.S. corporations use charitable donations to non-profits to influence regulators, and opening up possibilities for future research. In Chapters 1 and 2, I present co-authored research on the relationship between strategic advocacy in rulemaking and corporate philanthropy. For-profit corporations and non-profit entities are active in the rulemaking process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. However, non-profits also receive grants from firms with an interest in the outcomes of the regulatory process. Chapter 1 shows that corporations give large amounts of money to non-profits that participate in the rulemaking process and that, shortly after a firm donates to a non-profit, the non-profit is more likely to comment on rules for which the firm has also provided a comment. Chapter 2 extends the study of firms and non-profits to include the text content of regulatory comments, and the regulators response in the final rule. We find that, when a firm comments on a rule, the comments by non-profits that recently received grants from the firm’s foundation are systematically closer in content similarity to the firm’s own comments than to those submitted by other non-profits commenting on that rule. And, when a firm comments on a new rule, the discussion of the final rule is more similar to the firm’s comments when the firm’s recent grantees also comment on that rule. These patterns suggest that corporations strategically deploy charitable grants to induce non-profit grantees to make comments that favor their benefactors. In Chapter 3, I present a new technique for estimating influence of comments on final rules that improves on the approach used in Chapter 2. These new estimators can also control for each author's writing style with fixed effects.Arts, Faculty ofVancouver School of EconomicsGraduat