مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The literature on corporate political activity (CPA) has been integral in understanding how private firms interact and compete in the non-market (Baron, 1995). It has been argued that non-market activities are employed to extract private benefit from governmental authorities (i.e. rents). Even though research in transportation studies should be prime grounds for testing such rent extraction techniques, there has been a relative dearth in transportspecific studies that model firm-level political action with either determinants or outcomes. Several studies have addressed the political process in transportation markets, including Brach and Wachs (2005), who studied earmarking trends at the Department of Transportation; Antonson (2014), who qualitatively studied public participation in the rulemaking process in the transportation industry in Sweden; and deWit (2014), who studied protectionism between European commercial air carriers and their home governments during the perceived threat of its market territory by Gulf carriers. However, none of these studies have modeled the effects of firm-level political activity with performance variables. One paper that has addressed the results derived from public policy participation is Wessling et al. (2014), which studied how collective lobbying efforts materialized as a reaction to California’s emission standards after 2000.

andards after 2000. While these papers have all lead to more understanding of political activity in the transportation market, they still leave a wide gap in the literature. This is true for two reasons. First, there are simply too few papers that have addressed the specific causes and outcomes to CPA in transportation-based industries. Secondly, the papers that have been published are quite disparate in their goals and, therefore, have studied the phenomenon in quite idiosyncratic ways. In this paper, I intend to add to the existing literature on CPA and transportation by modeling the outcomes to firm-level CPA in a sample of air transportation firms over a 15 year period. By doing so, I contribute to both the literature on political action, which has called for more empirical testing of such relationships (Lux et al., 2011), and the literature on air transportation, which has just begun to study such relationships.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 includes a literature review as well as theory and hypothesis development. Section 3 is the theory section and includes hypotheses development. Section 4 explores the methods employed as well as the estimation technique and variable descriptions. Section 5 is the results section and Section 6 is a discussion, including limitations and future research.