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Time to Give: PAC Motivations and Electoral Timing McCarty, Nolan Rothenberg, Lawrence S. Uploaded 07-09-1998 Keywords Interest Groups Campaign Finance Tobit GHK Simulation Abstract There has been much discussion about how members of Congress desire money early in the campaign season. However, to date, models of how contributions are allocated during the electoral cycle have been lacking. Our analysis attempts to remedy this gap by providing and testing a model which specifies how the process by which bargaining between members of Congress and organized interests produces the pattern of donations observed over the course of the electoral cycle. The results suggest that strategic incumbents can receive money early in the campaign if they desire but that they are generally unwilling to pay the price of lower aggregate fundraising and greater provision of access. These findings, in turn, buttress earlier empirical findings that question the instrumental value of early money; in particular, they imply that challengers have reasonably rational and informed expectations about how much money members of Congress are capable of raising over the electoral cycle and that the value of stockpiling money early is not sufficiently high to induce reelection-seeking incumbents to lower their access price significan