For anyone paying attention to the hypocrisy surrounding the so-called “people’s pledge” in the Massachusetts Senate race, a new paper offers some good evidence of why you should be skeptical of these kinds of pledges in general. The paper, “Campaign Contributions from Corporate Executives in Lieu of Political Action Committees” is by Brian Keller Richter and Timothy Werner, both assistant professors of Business, Government, and Society at the University of Texas at Austin, finds that when candidates pledge to stop accepting money from political action committees (PACs), corporate CEOs step up their personal contributions.