Academic Earmarks and the Returns to Lobbying
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we estimate the returns to lobbying by universities. To motivate our empirical work, we develop a simple theoretical model of university lobbying for academic earmarks. Our statistical analysis shows that universities represented by a House Appropriations Committee (HAC) or Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) member spend less money on lobbying than those that are not represented. In addition, using instrumental variables estimations, we show that universities without HAC or SAC representation may receive some benefit to lobbying for earmarks, although in many estimations this benefit is not statistically different from zero. However, for universities with HAC or SAC representation, a 10 percent increase in lobbying yields an additional 2.8 percent or 3.5 percent increase in earmarks, respectively. This suggests that there are large returns to lobbying for academic earmarks if a university is represented by a member of one the HAC or SAC, but little or no return if not.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it