Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/35469 
Year of Publication: 
2008
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 3902
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. In our framework, politicians face a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The main hypothesis is that the amount of time spent on outside work is negatively related to the degree of electoral competition. We test this hypothesis using a new dataset on outside earnings of members of the German federal assembly. Taking into account the potential endogeneity of measures of political competition that depend on past election outcomes, we find that politicians facing low competition have substantially higher outside earnings.
Subjects: 
Political competition
outside earnings
political rents
JEL: 
D72
J45
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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