Connections between firms and politicians emerge, e.g., when politicians or their family members sit on the boards of firms or when politicians move to work in firms after their political career. Such corporate political connections can be used to unfairly favor individual firms or corporate elites, which may weaken democratic representation and market competition, but they can also facilitate information flows between industry and politics, benefiting the economy. The POLCO consortium conducts a comprehensive investigation of corporate political connections in Finland, utilizing its unique infrastructure of register data on firms and individuals. We link this data with several other data such as that on lobbying and parliamentary hearings. Using state-of-art quasi-experimental econometric methods, we investigate what explains the formation of connections as well as their political and economic consequences.

2025

2029