Collaborator: Donato Onorato, Ph.D. Candidate, Economics, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
The lobbying industry in the United States is large, and the origin of these lobbying revenues are often firms and industry-associations. Given the size of the lobbying industry, one immediately wonders whether lobbying is distortionary. While lobbying can be purely rent- seeking, there may be circumstances in which lobbying is beneficial. Data and methodological constraints have meant that only a limited set of questions and contexts on lobbying have received attention. Hence, one of the key objectives of this project will be to construct a novel database on lobbying activity in the United States from 1949 to 2002 by digitizing lobbying reports filed under the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act (FRLA) of 1946. The first period we hope to digitize is 1949-1960 which covers the years shortly after the FRLA was passed and the influential supreme court case United States v. Harris (1954) that curtailed lobbying reporting requirements. The second period covers the years 1993-1997 during which the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 was passed, which was supposed to address the shortcomings introduced by the 1954 ruling. Digitizing the reports from this period will also allow us to assess the incidence of any under-reporting due to the 1954 ruling by comparing lobbying activity before and after 1995.
Patel and Onorato will digitize these lobbying reports that are held at the National Archives. Their project aims to use this broader dataset covering the post-war US along with recent advances in natural language processing to classify lobbying activities into those related to general, productivity-enhancing policies versus specific, rent-seeking activities. This can shed light on a variety of questions related to the nature of firm lobbying in the US during a period of significant government investment, which can inform how governments conduct industrial policy.
