Abstract
State policies shape firms' incentives to lobby in the United States, but the existing lobbying literature mostly ignores these incentives. Using lobbying records for all electric utilities in the United States from 1998 to 2012, we examine how state policies affect federal lobbying by both proponents and opponents of federal support for the renewable energy policy. Our theory predicts that supportive state policies reduce the returns to lobbying by both proponents and opponents. Empirically, we show that when the federal production tax credit for renewable energy is about to expire, electric utilities from states without renewable portfolio standards become more likely to lobby than those from states with these policies. Because the timing of the expiration of the production tax credit is quasi-random, these findings carry a causal interpretation. Using text analysis techniques, we also show that the lobbying efforts are focused on energy and environmental issues while lobbying on unrelated topics remains unaffected.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-30 |
| Number of pages | 30 |
| Journal | State Politics and Policy Quarterly |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2021 Mar 1 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Sung Eun Kim would like to thank the Korea University Grant (No. K2002041) for support for this research. Joonseok Yang is grateful for support from the Program in Corporate Welfare Studies at the University of California, Irvine for this research. The authors would also like to thank In Song Kim and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez for their excellent comments on the previous draft of the mansucript.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
Keywords
- energy and environment
- federal and state policies
- lobbying
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- Political Science and International Relations
