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

Economics and Politics of Student Debt Relief

Posted by

Stylianos Papageorgiou

June 3, 2025

We study student debt relief as the product of probabilistic voting by an electorate that includes both college graduates and non-college laborers. While politicians favor the most homogeneous group in a probabilistic voting setup, we identify conditions under which politicians forgive student debt even when laborers are more homogeneous than graduates. This political asymmetry in…

Latest Papers & Opinions

Information, Party Politics, and Public Support for Central Bank Independence

Posted by

Ana Carolina Garriga

May 15, 2025

Why do citizens support central bank independence (CBI)? Despite important research on economic and political reasons to grant independence to central banks, we know little about what the public thinks about CBI. This is important given citizens’ potential role in constraining politicians’ ability to alter CBI. We hypothesize that support for CBI is influenced by…

Latest Papers & Opinions

Partisan Bias in Inflation Expectations: Evidence from the 2024 US Election

Posted by

Ana Carolina Garriga

April 30, 2025

How does partisanship affect inflation expectations? While most research focuses on how inflation impacts political approval and voter behavior, we analyze the political roots of inflation expectations. We argue that elections serve as key moments when citizens update their economic outlook based on anticipated policy changes, and that partisanship influences these re-evaluations. Using a two-wave…

Latest Papers & Opinions

Geopolitical Risk and Stock Returns

Posted by

Jinfei Sheng

April 14, 2025

This paper systematically examines the relationship between geopolitical risk and stock returns by constructing a comprehensive Geopolitical Risk Index (GRI) using Wall Street Journal articles from 1984 to 2025. GRI positively predicts excess market returns in the US and globally, in and out of sample, beyond other leading risk factors. The effects of geopolitical risk have intensified since 2000. The…

Latest Papers & Opinions

Corporate Cash under Populist Leadership: A Tale of Two Variants

Posted by

Wei-Fong Pan

February 12, 2025

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

Posted by

Yang Yao

January 29, 2025

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…