Protection for Sale: An Empirical Investigation: Comment

摘要

In this paper we estimated two alternative endogenous protection models to examine whether contributions or organization matters. The previous literature such as GH and GB rely on a complete information menu auction that renders organization, rather than contribution sizes as the key determinant for tariffs. The model performs well against the Tariff Formation Function model where contributions directly influence tariffs, and where noncooperative solutions do not imply zero net benefits to lobbying as in GH. Since the organization variable is constructed using contributions, the fundamental insight is that a step function performs better than the continuous contribution variable in estimating the influence of lobbies on protection.