Affiliation:
1. Department of Political Science, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK
Abstract
Firm-based approaches to international trade have revolutionized the study of trade politics. Corporate participation in political processes is costly, limiting access to large, productive, well-resourced, and often internationally engaged firms. This implies a pro-trade bias in corporate lobbying demands over trade policy. I examine this relationship in the case of three free trade agreements passed by the United States Congress in 2011. I combine public statements from firms on the FTAs with corporate lobbying activities and find that both lobbying firms and those that lobbied and publicly disclosed their policy positions were more productive than the typical publicly traded firm. Likewise, firms with income from foreign affiliates were more likely to be politically active than others. These results contribute to a vibrant body of research into the complex relationships firms hold with policies governing access to international markets.
Subject
General Business, Management and Accounting
Reference42 articles.
1. Toward a New Political Methodology: Microfoundations and ART;Achen;Annual Review of Political Science,2002
2. On Two Families of Transformations to Additivity for Binary Response Data;Biometrika,1981
3. Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage;Barney;Journal of Management,1991
4. Bauer, Raymond A, de Sola Pool, Ithiel, and Dexter, Lewis Anthony (1972). American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade, Aldine-Atherton, Inc.
5. Firms in International Trade;Bernard;Journal of Economic Perspectives,2007