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来源类型 | Working Paper |
规范类型 | 报告 |
DOI | 10.3386/w24451 |
来源ID | Working Paper 24451 |
Tax-Exempt Lobbying: Corporate Philanthropy as a Tool for Political Influence | |
Marianne Bertrand; Matilde Bombardini; Raymond Fisman; Francesco Trebbi | |
发表日期 | 2018-04-02 |
出版年 | 2018 |
语种 | 英语 |
摘要 | We explore the role of charitable giving as a means of political influence, a channel that has been heretofore unexplored in the political economy literature. For philanthropic foundations associated with Fortune 500 and S&P500 corporations, we show that grants given to charitable organizations located in a congressional district increase when its representative obtains seats on committees that are of policy relevance to the firm associated with the foundation. This pattern parallels that of publicly disclosed Political Action Committee (PAC) spending. As further evidence on firms’ political motivations for charitable giving, we show that a member of Congress’s departure leads to a short-term decline in charitable giving to his district, and we again observe similar patterns in PAC spending. Charities directly linked to politicians through personal financial disclosure forms filed in accordance to Ethics in Government Act requirements exhibit similar patterns of political dependence. Our analysis suggests that firms deploy their charitable foundations as a form of tax-exempt influence seeking. Based on a straightforward model of political influence, our estimates imply that 7.1 percent of total U.S. corporate charitable giving is politically motivated, an amount that is economically significant: it is 280 percent larger than annual PAC contributions and about 40 percent of total federal lobbying expenditures. Given the lack of formal electoral or regulatory disclosure requirements, charitable giving may be a form of political influence that goes mostly undetected by voters and shareholders, and which is directly subsidized by taxpayers. |
主题 | Financial Economics ; Financial Institutions ; Other ; Economic Systems |
URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w24451 |
来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
引用统计 | |
资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/582125 |
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Marianne Bertrand,Matilde Bombardini,Raymond Fisman,et al. Tax-Exempt Lobbying: Corporate Philanthropy as a Tool for Political Influence. 2018. |
条目包含的文件 | ||||||
文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
w24451.pdf(629KB) | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 |
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