Via Marginal Revolution, an interesting new paper that explores what happens to an ex-staffer’s lobbying revenue when the politician they worked for leaves office.
Our main finding is that lobbyists connected to US Senators suff er an average 24% drop in generated revenue when their previous employer leaves the Senate. The decrease in revenue is out of line with pre-existing trends, it is discontinuous around the period in which the connected Senator exits Congress and it persists in the long-term. The sharp decrease in revenue is also present when we study separately a small subsample of unexpected and idiosyncratic Senator exits. Measured in terms of median revenues per ex-staffer turned lobbyist, this estimate indicates that the exit of a Senator leads to approximately a $177,000 per year fall in revenues for each affiliated lobbyist. The equivalent estimated drop for lobbyists connected to US Representatives leaving Congress is a weakly statistically signi cant 10% of generated revenue. The equivalent estimated drop forlobbyists connected to US Representatives leaving Congress is a weakly statistically signi cant 10% ofgenerated revenue.We also find evidence that ex-sta ffers are more likely to leave the lobbying industry after their connected Senator or Representative exits Congress. (emphasis mine)
They also show that ex-staffers revenues has grown at a faster rate than non ex-staffers since the late 1990′s.
Here’s a graphical representation of the findings from Tyler Cowen:
e cross-fertilization of ideas from multiple disciplines within the social sciences (as well as the hard sciences). If you look at some of the more recent winners, their work transcended the discipline of economics and had a much broader impact on the study of human behavior and social dynamics broadly.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3d656df1-2f70-48d2-b2ee-b3173b1fa2ac)
, a fantastic book that you really should read) offers solid reasons to be skeptical of any pronouncements by ‘experts’ that they have some kind of proprietary knowledge about the future.
