It is no secret that a broad variety of firms divert significant resources into lobbying the European Union’s political institutions. Naturally, scholars have questioned whether or not private companies’ lobbying efforts actually translate into tangible changes in the content of the EU’s legislative output. Their findings suggesting that firms more often than not lose their ‘lobbying battles’ then present a puzzle. Why would firms continue to pour money into lobbying that rarely succeeds? In their article “Does it pay to lobby? Examining the link between firm lobbying and firm profitability in the European Union” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Adam William Chalmers and Francisco Santos Macedo study the relationship between firms’ lobbying efforts and a success metric arguably closer to their key interests than changing legislative outcomes: profit. Drawing on original data comprising information on the lobbying and financial performance of over 700 firms over four years, Adam and Francisco show that spending more money on lobbying is positively associated with firms’ overall profitability. While private companies’ lobbying may rarely shape EU legislation, evidence suggests “that the institutional structure and lobbying context of the EU, which both requires considerable lobbying expenditures in the form of informational lobbying, and which promotes longer term relationships between lobbyists and public officials, is conducive to seeing financial returns on firms’ lobbying efforts.”