Shareholder versus Stakeholder Protection and Interest-Group Politics

This paper develops a framework for analyzing how lobbying by interest groups affects the levels of both shareholder and stakeholder protection. We find that lobbying may lead the equilibrium level of shareholder protection to be suboptimal; the new result is that it may be too high, not just too low. We show that deregulation of lobbying increases the suboptimality of protection levels, while ownership concentration contributes to reduce it.