Researchers Try To Quantify The Value Of Lobbying

If academic researchers want to quantify the value of lobbying they can usually look at how much different companies spend on it (controlling for size, industry, and other factors) and compare outcomes to get a sense of how effective it was. But pinning a dollar value on corruption, aside from being more controversial, is a lot harder for the simple reason that no one is going to report an illegal tit-for-tat. In their recent paper The corporate value of (corrupt) lobbying, three researchers have tried to get around this problem by asking a related question: which companies take the biggest…