Politicians' Outside Earnings and Electoral Competition

Abstract

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians'outside earnings. We propose a simple theoretical model with politicians facing a tradeo¤ between allocating their time to political e¤ort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The model has a testable implication stating that the amount of time spent on outside work is negatively related to the degree of electoral competition. We test this implication 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 …nd that politicians facing low competition have substantially higher outside earnings.JEL Classi…cation: D72, J45

Do politicians shirk when reelection is certain? Evidence from the German parliament

“…Complementarity of absence rates to the measure of Becker et al (2009) is supported by the fact that I find different results compared to theirs for MPs of governing parties. and in the European Parliament.…”

“…This instrument has been used first by Becker et al (2009). Since the first and the second votes are cast at the same time and a lot of voters cast both votes according to party preferences, there is a high correlation between the two votes.…”

Are Female Legislators Different? Exploring Sex Differences in German MPs' Outside Interests

“…city/county councillor). 6 Although this official data source has also been utilised in Becker et al (2009), Mause (2009, and Niessen and Ruenzi (2010), none of these studies examines the role of politicians' sex in detail, nor differentiates between different types of sideline activities. Before proceeding with the analysis, however, it should be noted that the number of outside interests is clearly an imperfect measure of MPs extra-parliamentary activities.…”

“…Although a matter of public and political debate in many countries, outside interests have been largely neglected thus far in the sex-differences literature discussed above. 1 Indeed, while several studies have observed that in the national parliaments of Germany and Italy as well as in U.S. state legislatures female MPs on average have fewer outside jobs (Maddox, 2004;Mause, 2009) and/or lower outside income (Becker et al, 2009;Gagliarducci et al, 2010) than their male colleagues, no studies exist, to the best of our knowledge, that investigate this finding further. 2 Yet, such findings clearly raise more questions than they answer:…”

The politicians’ wage gap: insights from German members of parliament

“…In the empirical analysis we make use of a unique micro dataset of personal and professional information on German MPs, providing detailed insight into their earnings (including office remuneration and outside earnings) as well as their occupation before entering parliament (Becker et al, 2009). We combine these data with the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), a micro dataset which is representative for the German population and thus for the electorate.…”