دانلود رایگان مقاله لابی گری ارتباط سیاسی و عملکرد مالی در صنعت حمل و نقل هوایی

abstract

While there is a deeper understanding of the outcomes to firm-level political activities in general, there are very few papers that address this relationship in transportation studies. In this paper, I empirically test firm-level rent-seeking through corporate political activity (CPA) in the air transportation industry. I find, in a sample of 46 firms over 15 years, that lobbying intensity and political connections are positively related to subsequent profitability in both fixed-effects and random-effects estimations. I also test the interaction of these two main effects and find mixed support for the moderating effect of political connections on lobbying intensity. This paper contributes to the theoretical literature on political rentseeking and the topical literature on political action in air transportation.

6. Discussion

6.1. Implications for theory and literature This paper has implications for both current theory and topical literature. First, the paper contributes to theories of rent-seeking through political activities, which has had ever-increasing popularity in recent years (Lux et al., 2011). The results herein point to the ability of firms to garner rents through their actions in the nonmarket, and specifically in the public policy arena. While there has been previous evidence pointing to this relationship (Hillman, 2005; Richter et al., 2009; Bonardi et al., 2006), there are competing views of CPA and subsequent performance. Most notable of these is that CPA is an “arms race” amongst firms and incremental spending on political activity does not lead to marginal rents, but instead leads to a zero sum game (Ansolabehere et al., 2003). This view, which addresses the Tullock Paradox (Tullock, 1972), while interesting has had little to no support in the empirical CPA literature. While the findings in the current work do not constitute proof to dispute Ansolabehere et al. (2003)’s contentions, it does constitute additional evidence to the contrary.