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We hypothesize that political activism is valuable because it helps reduce political uncertainty, which, in turn, fosters firm innovation. We find that firms that support more politicians, winning politicians, politicians on congressional committees with jurisdictional authority over the firms' industries, and politicians who join those committees innovate more. We employ a natural experiment to show a causal effect of political activism on innovation. We also show evidence of intra-industry and geographical political activism spillovers.

We develop a new and comprehensive database of firm-level contributions to U.S. political campaigns from 1979 to 2004. We construct variables that measure the extent of firm support for candidates. We find that these measures are positively and significantly correlated with the cross-section of future returns. The effect is strongest for firms that support a greater number of candidates that hold office in the same state that the firm is based. In addition, there are stronger effects for firms whose contributions are slanted toward House candidates and Democrats.

Stock price increases associated with addition to the S&P 500 Index have been interpreted as evidence that demand curves for stocks slope downward. A key premise underlying this interpretation is that Index inclusion provides no new information about companies' future prospects. We examine this premise by analyzing analysts' earnings per share (eps) forecasts around Index inclusion and by comparing postinclusion realized earnings to preinclusion forecasts. Relative to benchmark companies, companies newly added to the Index experience significant increases in eps forecasts and significant improvements in realized earnings. These results indicate that S&P Index inclusion is not an information-free event.

Prior studies argue that investment by undervalued firms that require external equity is particularly sensitive to stock prices in irrational capital markets. We present a model in which investment can appear to be more sensitive to stock prices when capital markets are rational, but subject to imperfections such as debt overhang, information asymmetries, and financial distress costs. Our empirical tests support the rational (but imperfect) capital markets view. Specifically, investment–stock price sensitivity is related to firm leverage, financial slack, and probability of financial distress, but is not related to proxies for firm undervaluation. Because, in our model, stock prices reflect the net present values (NPVs) of investment opportunities, our results are consistent with rational capital markets improving the allocation of capital by channeling more funds to firms with positive NPV projects.

We analyze a novel data set of corporate contributions to ballot initiatives and referendums at the U.S. state level between 2003 and 2018. Ballot initiatives and referendums allow citizens of 26 U.S. states to vote directly on legislation. Firms make significant campaign contributions to ballot measure committees in favor of or against specific initiatives that exceed on average their political action committee contributions. Firms that contribute to successful (failed) direct initiated state initiatives generate positive (negative) CARs of 0.32% (-0.21%) on average around the election. They also experience significant sales growth in the two years surrounding successful ballot measure campaigns.

Debt is a significant source of funding of political campaigns, with almost half of all campaigns relying on some form of debt. We analyze the incentives created by this type of debt financing. We show that indebted politicians raise more funds in subsequent elections, especially from special interest groups. Consistent with votes-for-money arrangements, indebted politicians vote for the benefit of those interest groups that help funding their reelection campaigns. The findings support the hypothesis that debt creates distortions, as it forces indebted politicians to take policy positions that are not aligned with the local constituents’ interests.

Regulation and subsequent deregulation significantly affect firms' debt decisions. Prior to deregulation, regulated firms depend significantly more on long-term and public debt but reduce this dependence considerably during deregulation. Cross-sectional analysis shows that the reduction in the use of long-term and public debt results from changing firm sensitivities to determinants of debt decisions triggered by deregulation. Consistent with credit and liquidity risk theories of debt maturity, the concave relation between firm quality and debt maturity is significantly attenuated among regulated firms. Inconsistent with these theories, the convex relation between firm quality and the preference for public debt exists only among regulated firms. I find limited support for other theories.

In the first essay, I test the predictions of the market timing theory of capital structure on a comprehensive sample of firms that issued debt and equity during the period January 1974–December 2001. I first categorize firms as likely and unlikely market timers based on their ability to time the market. As a proxy for firms' ability to time the market, I use the index of financing constraints developed in Kaplan and Zingales (KZ) (1997). Separately, I categorize firms as likely and unlikely market timers based on their opportunities to time the market. I argue that firms will have more opportunities to time the market when their stock market prices do not reflect fundamental information about them. I proxy for the firm's stock price informativeness with the R-squared statistic obtained from regressing a firm's stock returns prior to a debt or equity issuance against industry and market returns as in Morck et al. (2000). I classify firms with a low R-squared statistic as having informative stock prices that rarely diverge from fundamentals. Such firms are classified as unlikely market timers. Given these a priori classifications of firms, I test whether firm financing choices differ across likely and unlikely market timers as predicted by market timing theory. I find that the unlikely market timers behave either no differently than the likely market timers or opposite that predicted by the market timing theory. In short, the results do not support the market timing theory. In the second essay, I examine the role of capital market imperfections on the allocation of capital across firms. Market imperfections make external financing costly and discourage investment for financially constrained firms. Changes in the investment opportunity set may reduce the effects of market imperfections on the cost of external capital and stimulate investment for financially constrained firms. Consistent with this hypothesis, I find that the sensitivity of investment to stock prices is significantly higher for financially constrained firms. Further, I link the increased sensitivity of investment to stock prices to changes in the cost of external financing.

Firm political contributions are associated with lower credit default swap spreads for contributing firms. To address endogeneity, we employ novel instruments and use a set of exogenous events on campaign contribution restrictions: (a) the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) that banned soft money contributions, (b) the Federal Election Commission decision to interpret the BCRA less strictly, (c) the partial reversal of the BCRA and, (d) the McConnell v. FEC Supreme Court decision, which upheld the BCRA. Overall, the evidence suggests that political contributions are valued by credit market participants.