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
Corporate Cash under Populist Leadership: A Tale of Two Variants
How do firms manage liquidity in populist-led countries? Using close elections involving populists, we test two hypotheses: populism prompts firms to either (i) increase cash holdings due to political risk and economic nationalism, or (ii) reduce cash reserves due to business friendliness. We find contrasting outcomes based on the variant of populism: right-wing populism leads…
Latest Papers & Opinions
Government Deleveraging and the Reverse Crowding-in Effect
We show that government deleveraging causes liquidity squeeze among non-state-owned-enterprise (non-SOE) contractors, an unintended consequence of containing subnational debts. Our empirical analysis exploits China’s top-down deleveraging policy in 2017 that restricts local governments’ borrowing capacity and a purpose-built dataset of listed firms matched with government procurement contracts. Non-SOE contractors experience larger accounts receivable increases, larger…
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…
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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
