Lobbying for Industrialization
Abstract
This paper develops a model of lobbying over industrialization policies and tests its predictions against the data on public petitions to the British Parliament and the US Congress in the 18th-19th centuries. Our theory integrates endogenous lobbying over industrial policies into the standard two-sector model of structural change, and predicts that the intensity of such lobbying first increases at the early stages of structural change, and then declines when the traditional sector contracts. This prediction finds support in the data on industrialization-related petitions in both Britain and the US. Moreover, the model predicts that places with historically more concentrated capital ownership are more successful in lobbying for industrialization. The opposite holds for the concentration of land ownership. We find support for these predictions in (i) data on petitions, (ii) counterfactual simulations, and (iii) historical examples from the 19th century Prussia and from the Middle East.
About this workshop
The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.
The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.
Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.