How Economic Opportunity Ameliorates Political Risk: The Case of Current Office Holders Considering Running for Higher Office.

This paper argues that sitting politicians are more likely to take run for higher office when their private market opportunities are better. The intuition behind this prediction is that politicians should be more willing to take that risk when they have an attractive fallback option. I test this prediction by using a fixed-effects (a.k.a. condition) logistic regression to analyze the decision of U.S. House members to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The results show that House members are more likely to run for a Senate seat when their expected income from working in the private sphere is higher. This result holds through the several robustness checks that are preformed. Implications of the results for the nature of competition in American politics are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]