Revolving Door Lobbyists

Washington's 'revolving door' - the movement from government service into the lobbying industry- is regarded as a major concern for policy-making. We study how ex-government staffers benefit from the personal connections acquired during their public service. Lobbyists with experience in the office of a US Senator suffer a 24% drop in generated revenue when that Senator leaves office. The effect is immediate, discontinuous around the exit period and long-lasting. Consistent with the notion that lobbyists sell access to powerful politicians, the drop in revenue is increasing in the seniority of and committee assignments power held by the exiting politician.Lobbying, revolving door, US Congress, political connections, political elites

In brief: 'Revolving door' lobbyists

Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca and Christian Fons-Rosen estimate the value of political connections in Washington

The returns to lobbying

Research by Mirko Draca and colleagues on Washington's 'revolving door' lobbyists gives an indication of the value of political connections in the UK.

On the (un)importance of working memory in speech-in-noise processing for listeners with normal hearing thresholds

With the advent of cognitive hearing science, increased attention has been given to individual differences in cognitive functioning and their explanatory power in accounting for inter-listener variability in the processing of speech in noise (SiN). The psychological construct that has received much interest in recent years is working memory. Empirical evidence indeed confirms the association between WM capacity (WMC) and SiN identification in older hearing-impaired listeners. However, some theoretical models propose that variations in WMC are an important predictor for variations in speech processing abilities in adverse perceptual conditions for all listeners, and this notion has become widely accepted within the field. To assess whether WMC also plays a role when listeners without hearing loss process speech in adverse listening conditions, we surveyed published and unpublished studies in which the Reading-Span test (a widely used measure of WMC) was administered in conjunction with a measure of SiN identification, using sentence material routinely used in audiological and hearing research. A meta-analysis revealed that, for young listeners with audiometrically normal hearing, individual variations in WMC are estimated to account for, on average, less than 2% of the variance in SiN identification scores. This result cautions against the (intuitively appealing) assumption that individual variations in WMC are predictive of SiN identification independently of the age and hearing status of the listener

The Transmission of Sectoral Shocks Across the Innovation Network

Recent innovation literature has documented the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas across a wide set of industries and technology fields in an economy. Industrial and trade policies, by contrast, tend to favor economic specialization through the promotion of selected sectors. In this paper we use a firm-level panel of 13 European countries to assess whether an industry-specific policy propagates across the network of innovating firms through technological linkages. Following the competition shock to the European textile sector, triggered by the 2001 removal of import quotas on Chinese textiles, we find that patenting and knowledge sourcing behavior of non-textile firms are negatively affected. At the aggregate regional level, this indirect effect on non-textile firms can be around three to five times larger than the direct effect

How to See the Future : Forecasting and Global Policy

To help bridge this gap and advance discussions on forecasting, Perry World House convened a two-day colloquium focused on "How to See the Future: Forecasting and Global Policy" on September 27–28, 2021. The colloquium was animated by a simple belief: Better forecasts can facilitate better policy. When governments can rank the probabilities of global threats, when they can understand the factors that increase the likelihood of a global pandemic or a terrorist attack,and when they can have more accurate information about their adversaries' likely actions, they can tailor policy more accurately to the world's most pressing problems.