Abstract
Models of firms’ influence over the regulatory agencies that oversee them have traditionally been constrained by several factors, including a lack of direct measures of “influence,” an inability to account for variations in the institutional environment within which firms operate, and a nearly singular focus on industry-level measures of interest group strengths. In this paper, we employ a global database and novel measures to provide a fresh look at the determinants of firms’ influence over regulatory agencies. We find that in addition to traditional industry-level determinants, important country-level institutional and firm-level determinants affect firms’ regulatory agency influence. We also find that regulatory process variations affect firms’ influence over regulators. With these empirical estimates in hand, we generate a Regulatory Influence Index that ranks influence levels of typical firms that operate in each sample country in the dataset, and then discuss the substantial country-level variation in regulatory agency influence that obtains.
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Macher, J.T., Mayo, J.W. The World of Regulatory Influence. J Regul Econ 41, 59–79 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11149-011-9178-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11149-011-9178-8