Who Gets What? City Lobbying and State Transfers

Abstract

This chapter uses a variety of panel data methods to estimate the returns to lobbying for individual municipalities. When cities start lobbying, they receive significantly more revenue from the state in the following year compared to other cities. But not all localities benefit equally. In particular, wealthy communities with higher median incomes tend to receive substantially more revenue after lobbying than less affluent municipalities. The chapter concludes by discussing some of the mechanisms that might be driving these results. While higher-income cities don’t spend more money on lobbying, they do spread their efforts across a greater number of bills, and they appear to be particularly savvy at using their lobbyists to advocate for shovel-ready projects that make attractive funding targets for state officials.