have examined the response of congressional candidates to changes in the value of seats in the House of Representatives. The theory treats the campaign expenditure of a candidate as an investment in a congressional seat which has an expected present value. A candidate will spend a greater amount to acquire a seat the larger the expected present value of the seat. Several factors influence the value of a congressional seat. Crain, Deaton and Tollison [2, p. 299] argue that one important factor is the size of the federal budget which can be considered "a pork barrel pie that gets split up among legislators".
In recent years the United States Congress has passed laws which alter property rights in the private sector. These laws do not directly affect the Federal Budget since they do not involve taxation and/or expenditure decisions. These laws do affect the allocation of resources in the private sector, however, by altering the structure of property rights. If transaction costs are positive (and they are), this activity will change the allocation of resources. Examples of these laws are the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments regarding drugs, auto safety legislation, safety legislation in general, minimum wage legislation, environmental legislation, and wage and price controls. This type of legislation transfers property rights from the private sector to the legislative authority. Since the ownership of rights increases wealth, this shifting of rights should increase the~ present value of holding a seat in congress. Further, the executive may share in this increased wealth as a result of his power to veto or administer these programs. In summary , we hypothesize that shifting real resources from the private sector to the public, as well as certain changes in the structure of property rights will increase the value of executive and congressional offices. In the test that follows, the size of the real government budget is used to capture the effect on the value of seats from shifting real resources away from the private to the public sector. A dummy for wage and price controls is employed to test