About PolEconFin
PolEconFin is a platform for researchers active in political economy of finance. This initiative seeks to provide a meeting point for theorists and empiricists with shared interests and build a research community with a focus on public policy.
PolEconFin comprises of two related projects:
1. The online platform to support and promote research in political economy of finance
2. The Stigler Center-CEPR Conference Series to stimulate in-person interaction between researchers
Latest Papers & Opinions
Does Partisanship Affect Mutual Fund Information Processing?
This paper studies how partisanship affects mutual fund information processing at the firm level. Using textual analysis of earnings call transcripts, I identify discussions on partisan-sensitive topics, such as climate change, pandemic, and healthcare. I find that partisan funds react more strongly to topics aligned with their ideological beliefs and trade more after firms increase…
Latest Papers & Opinions
Corporate Lobbying and Returns to Non-Lobbying Industry Competitors
This paper shows that corporate lobbying generates within-industry effects. Firms that do not lobby experience negative stock returns around the passage of new federal bills and resolutions that attract more lobbying from their competitors. To show that the value losses are related to lobbying, I use plausibly exogenous variation in lobbying intensity generated by lawsuits…
Latest Papers & Opinions
Consuming Values
We study the extent to which individuals’ consumption decisions are influenced by firms’ stances on controversial social issues and the implied incentives for firms to take such stances. We use transactions from a major payment card company to predict cardholders’ likely social alignment with firm stances and to quantify effects on consumption. The social stances…
Latest Papers & Opinions
Bank Lobbying as a Financial Safety Net
I argue creditors, plausibly considering the link between bank lobbying and government bailouts, reflect the financial-safety-net aspect of bank lobbying. My structural estimation based on U.S. data suggests bank lobbying is negatively associated with the occurrence of a run-like equilibrium when a bank is subject to multiple equilibria. The estimated effect on bank risk and…
Latest Papers & Opinions
- Electoral politics
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- Empirics
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- Financial markets
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- Political institutions
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- Special interest politics
Markets under Siege: How Political Beliefs Move Financial Markets
Can political beliefs, particularly about benefits of war versus peace, move thick financial markets? We document that following an unlikely victory by French citizen-soldiers during the German Siege of Paris (1870), prices of the highly liquid French sovereign bond diverged substantially and persistently there versus elsewhere. While France resisted, Parisian prices were higher and responded…
Latest Papers & Opinions
Regulatory Capture in Public Procurement
This paper studies how hiring public officials affects firms’ ability to win government contracts in Japan. We link personnel transitions of public officials to contractors and government contracts awarded to those contractors over time. Using within-firm variation, we find evidence consistent with exchange of post-public employment for increases in government contract awards. Our results suggest…
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Behind this initiative
PolEconFin comprises of two related projects:
1. The online platform to support and promote research in political economy of finance
2. The CEPR Conference Series to stimulate in-person interaction between researchers
