This paper analyzes congressional voting on tobacco issues over two decades. Contrary to existing claims, the analysis shows that the tobacco industry's legislative success is more a function of representatives' regulatory and pro-business ideologies than of tobacco PAC money or a geographically-based tobacco voting bloc. In most cases, the tobacco voting bloc—representatives and senators from major tobacco producing districts and states—is not strong enough to protect and sustain the tobacco price support system, let alone affect the outcome of commercial issues such as cigarette taxes and regulation. The industry's campaign contributions also have sporadic and limited impact on commercial issues affecting tobacco. Only on agricultural issues do tobacco PAC contributions exhibit any influence.

China's industrial policy for high-technology industries combines key features of the policies pursued elsewhere in East Asia such as opening to foreign investors and supporting domestic firms. Leveraging its large market size, China has gone further than other developing countries by promoting standards for products that compete in China with products controlled by major electronics companies. This paper analyzes the experience to date of this Chinese policy in the consumer optical storage industry in the context of China's evolving national innovation system. China's standard-setting policy is politicized but ultimately pragmatic, which avoids imposing excessive costs on the economy. It may also have dynamic learning benefits for Chinese firms who are starting to compete in global markets.

This paper compares the economic efficiency of firm-agency governance structures for pollution reduction using transaction costs economics. Two governance structures are analyzed with the transaction costs approach: command and control regulation (CCR) and negotiated agreements (NAs). We propose that the choice of governance structure depends on the strategies firms pursue given the attributes of their transactions and their market opportunities. The application of transaction cost economics analysis leads to different choices of regulatory instruments. Firms in more mature, stable industries are likely to choose command and control, while firms in new, dynamic sectors are more likely to opt for negotiated agreements. Frequency of transactions is a key factor in firm choice.

The conventional view of private campaign contributions is that they distort policy to the detriment of society. Formal models consistent with such views, however, are based on restrictive assumptions about the nature of campaigns, interest groups and policy dimensionality. This paper relaxes those assumptions and allows for informative campaigns, multiple interest groups and multiple issue dimensions. It uses analytical and computational methods to demonstrate that private campaign contributions from societally unrepresentative contributors can, under reasonable conditions, improve social welfare. Multidimensionality is important because politicians need to be responsive on salient issues to prevent opponents from raising money based on less salient issues and using the money to publicize positions on salient issues.