Institute of the Environment and Sustainability

In 2013, the energy and natural resources sector spent $359 million lobbying. Such spending is largely perceived as a strategy by industry to oppose regulation. Research has barely begun to investigate how firm-level performance on salient political issues affects corporate political strategy. In this paper, we address this issue in the context of the recent climate change policy debate in the United States. We hypothesize a U-shaped relationship between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and lobbying expenditures. To test our hypothesis, our study leverages novel data on firm-level GHG emissions and lobbying expenses aimed specifically at climate change legislation. Our results based on 3,194 firm-observations during a 4 year-period, suggest that both dirty and clean firms are active in lobbying, which challenges the view of adversarial corporate strategy.