IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32574.html

Political Connections, Allocation of Stimulus Spending, and the Jobs Multiplier

Author

Listed:
  • Joonkyu Choi
  • Veronika Penciakova
  • Felipe Saffie

Abstract

We study the role of firms’ political influence on the effectiveness of government spending using ARRA as a laboratory. Through an IV approach, we show that a 10 percentage points increase in the share of politically connected spending lowers the job creation effect of stimulus by 33 percent at the state level. We exploit ex-post close state-level elections to establish that firms that contributed to winning candidates create fewer jobs after winning grants. Using a quantitative general equilibrium model, we show that politically connected spending also lowers the aggregate jobs multiplier, and that the dampening effect is rationalized by connected firms charging higher markups.

Suggested Citation

  • Joonkyu Choi & Veronika Penciakova & Felipe Saffie, 2024. "Political Connections, Allocation of Stimulus Spending, and the Jobs Multiplier," NBER Working Papers 32574, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32574
    Note: EFG POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32574.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Diegmann, André & Pohlan, Laura & Weber, Andrea, 2024. "Do Politicians Affect Firm Outcomes? Evidence from Connections to the German Federal Parliament," IZA Discussion Papers 17031, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Barbakadze, I., 2023. "With a Little Help from My Friend: Political Connections and Allocation of COVID-19 Aid," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2355, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    3. Choi, Jaedo, 2025. "Lobbying, trade, and misallocation," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 155(C).
    4. Chen, Yutong & Chiplunkar, Gaurav & Sekhri, Sheetal & Sen, Anirban & Seth, Aaditeshwar, 2025. "How do political connections of firms matter during an economic crisis?," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 175(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32574. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.