Elected representatives in many countries are legally allowed to carry out (un)paid jobs in addition to their political mandate, often referred to as 'moonlighting'. Despite the important selection and incentive effects such outside positions might engender, academic studies evaluating the prevalence, desirability and/or consequences of politicians' moonlighting have remained relatively scarce; often due to severe data restrictions. In recent years, however, more stringent disclosure rules have increased data availability, and large-sample analyses are becoming increasingly feasible. Besides surveying recent empirical contributions to this developing research field, this paper also outlines unresolved issues and thereby develops an agenda for future enquiry.

This article examines whether sex matters with respect to a type of legislator behaviour that has thus far been neglected in the literature analysing the distinctive nature of female and male legislators: parliamentarians' outside interests. Using data for 614 German MPs, our analysis confirms that female MPs on average hold fewer outside jobs than men -especially in private-sector functions. We also find that individual characteristics such as political experience, having (young) children, and age reflect sources of this divergence. These findings and their implications are discussed in the light of extensive research on sex and gender effects in other political and labour market settings. (104 words)

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This article statistically analyzes the moonlighting activities of members of the German Bundestag. In contrast to popular prejudices about "the political class," the data reveal that there are considerable differences among the 613 MPs regarding (i) the number and type of ancillary activities and (ii) the amount of outside income. Moreover a multiple regression analysis shows that the factors party affiliation, duration of parliamentary membership, age, and number of children contribute to the explanation of the observable differences. However, the empirical findings for MPs' outside income have to be viewed with skepticism as the official disclosure rules do not create full income transparency. Copyright 2009 die Autoren Journal compilation 2009, Verein für Socialpolitik und Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Within the economics of higher education, there is a small but influential literature that describes and analyzes the outcomes of competitive processes on markets for higher educational services. Colleges and universities in the United States currently invest a vast amount of resources in order to attract well‐qualified students. Costly activities like advertising, infrastructure investments, the recruitment of academic stars, or the granting of merit‐based tuition discounts can be interpreted as different forms of “market signaling” in the sense of Spence. According to some social science authors, these signaling activities have reached a dimension that has to be classified as excessive or socially wasteful from a welfare‐economic viewpoint. The present article makes some conceptual remarks on this excessive‐signaling hypothesis, and intends to contribute to the debate about the (potentially) harmful and beneficial effects of competition in higher education.

In modern democracies, politicians' accountability is often linked to the disciplining mechanism of electoral control. For politicians in their final term, this mechanism is impaired. Using a novel data set covering 910 members of the UK House of Commons active within the period 1997–2010, we investigate how reduced electoral control affects last‐term MPs' trade‐off between work effort inside parliament, leisure, and outside interests. Our main contributions lie in providing the first explicit consideration of (1) MPs' final‐term intra‐/extraparliamentary work balance and (2) MPs' reasons for leaving parliament (i.e., retirement, career change, electoral defeat). These extensions provide important fresh insights concerning the boundaries of elections' disciplining power.

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