[pt] Nesse artigo, eu estudo a relação de alocação de crédito e contribuições de camapanhas políticas. Para atingir tal objetivo, eu uso dados de emprestimo das opereções indiretas do banco nacional de desenvolvimento economômico e social (BNDES) no nível da firma entre 2003 e 2014. Explorando variação da mesma empresa contribuindo e não contribuindo para campanhas políticas e de tipos de bancos, eu testo se firmas que contribuíram para campanhas políticas no nível federal têm acesso preferencial a credito por meio de efeito fixo de firma-banco, firma-tempo e de banco-tempo. Eu encontro que empresas conectadas politicamente vêem sua probabilidade de receber um empréstimo de bancos federais aumentar. Por outro lado, elas têm uma probabilidade menor de receber de bancos privados. Resultados na margem intensiva indicam que empresas conectadas com políticos no nível federal recebem, em média, contratos de crédito maiores de bancos federais. Além disso, essas empresas tomam emprestado valores menores de bancos privados. Esse efeito é concentrado na linha de crédito usada para financiar máquinas e equipamentos. Efeitos heterogêneos de conexões com candidatos ganhadores e perdedores variam de acordo com o modelo econométrico. / [en] In this paper, I study the relationship between allocation of credit and political campaign contribution. In order to achieve this goal, I use loan data on indirect operations from Brazilian development bank (BNDES) at the firm level between 2003 and 2014. Exploring variation for the same firm contributing and not contributing to political campaign and for type of bank, I test if firms that contribute to political campaign at the federal level have preferential access to credit through firm-bank, firm-time and bank-time fixed effect. I find that politically connected firms increase their likelihood of receiving a loan from state-owned banks. On the other hand, they have a lower probability of receiving a loan from private banks. Results for intensive margin show that companies connected with politicians at the federal level receive, on average, greater credit from federal banks. In addition, these companies borrow lower amounts from private banks. This effect is concentrated on the credit line used to fund machine and equipment. Heterogeneous effects of connections with winning and losing candidates vary according to the econometric model I use.

Yes / While previous research has emphasized the role of stakeholder pressures, firm‐specific factors, as well as CEO characteristics as important drivers of corporate social responsibility (CSR) implementation, our understanding of how political connections impact small and medium‐sized enterprises' (SMEs') CSR implementation expenditure is quite limited. In this study, we contribute to filling this gap by investigating the effects of political connections and CSR expenditure and explain the conditions that impact this relationship. Using data from 473 SMEs in Ghana, we find that political connections negatively influence CSR implementation expenditure. However, the negative effect is weakened when a firms' reputation and competitive CSR implementation pressures are high. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. / University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Cette thèse est composée de trois chapitres distincts qui visent à analyser empiriquement la prise de décisions des entreprises et/ou des dirigeants dans le champ de la comptabilité financière. Le premier chapitre, co-écrit avec Francois Brochet et Sven Michael Spira, analyse comment le risque d’action collective sur les marchés financiers pour des raisons liées à des investissement discipline le comportement des dirigeants et réduit les coûts d’agence. Le deuxième chapitre étudie comment des changements de règlementation sur le marché du travail crée des incitations pour les dirigeants à manipuler leurs comptes autrement, ce qui est néfaste pour l’entreprise. Le troisième chapitre, co-écrit avec Renaud Coulomb et Marc Sangnier, étudie comment les connections politiques conduisent les dirigeants des entreprises à commettre des délits d’initiés présumés. / This dissertation is composed of three distinct chapters that empirically investigate various forms of decision-making by firms and/or managers in the field of empirical financial accounting. The first chapter presents a work joint with Francois Brochet and Sven Michael Spira, analyzing how the risk of securities lawsuit for investment-related reasons disciplines managers and reduce agency concerns with respect to investment. The second chapter examines how changes in labor regulation affect managers’ incentives to manipulate earnings using other tools that are ultimately detrimental to firms. The third chapter, joint with Renaud Coulomb and Marc Sangnier, explores how political connections lead directors to engage in plausibly fraudulent insider trading in financial markets.

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The Value of Political Connections: Evidence from the Czech Republic Miroslav Palanský Abstract This thesis estimates the value of political connections in the Czech Republic and it is divided into two parts. The first one explores the recently extended, most advanced publicly available data set on political party financing in the Czech Republic, covering the time period 1995-2015. We analyze basic patterns in party funding and their development over time. We focus primarily on private funding from both legal and natural persons. The data show that there exists substantial heterogeneity in the volume of private funding across parties and over time, but contributions from the government budget remain the most important source of income for all larger parties. We analyze the available data on donations and discuss several issues regarding the notion that donors may view contributions as investment, yielding possible profits in the future. In the second part, we use the data set of corporate donations to construct a proxy variable for political connections and to estimate the effect of being connected to a political party on the financial performance of such firms. We find that the connected firms perform significantly better than the non- connected ones in the years following the establishment of the...

Politically connected firms may extract rent which significantly improves their financial performance, but with social costs to others in form of market distortions. The thesis presents the first empirical analysis of personal political connections to government ministers in the Czech Republic. We estimated value of political connections and inspected subsidies and public procurements allocation as channels of rent extraction on firm-level data set of 1993-2015 period. For both approaches, cross-section regressions and dynamic matching on covariates and propensity score, we found that connected firms significantly underperform their similar rivals, but slightly improve their performance over the time of connection to minister in office. Connected firms gain significantly more subsidies which confirms subsidy allocation as a channel of rent extraction. We interpret our results that firms may seek political connections as the last option how to improve their bad financial results and remain on the market. Biased subsidy allocation to connected firms in sectors where firms are dependent on subsidies like agriculture creates market distortions and could lead to significant consumer harm.

Cette thèse est composée de trois essais, chacun contribuant à mieux comprendre la façon dont différents types de relations politiques affectent les stratégies d'expansion internationale et la performance des entreprises. Le premier essai examine le rôle des relations politiques comme modérateur de la relation entre les attributs du pays hôte et le choix d’investir dans ce pays par des entreprises. Nous examinons le cas des premiers investissements dans les pays concernés par des entreprises du secteur manufacturier au cours de la période 2003-2010. Les autres essais examinent le rôle des relations politiques comme antécédents directs des décisions et des performances des stratégies d'expansion internationale des entreprises. Le deuxième essai étudie l’influence des différents types de relations politiques dans l’ampleur et le profil de risque des investissements internationaux des entreprises. Enfin, le troisième essai analyse le rôle des connexions politiques en tant que facteur explicatif de la capacité des entreprises à accélérer le financement et le développement de leurs projets. Les deux derniers essais sont testés sur une base de données originale recensant les relations politiques dont bénéficient les plus grandes entreprises françaises au cours de la période 2003-2012. / This dissertation is composed of the three essays, each contributing to address part of the puzzle regarding how different types of political connections affect firms’ international expansion strategies and performance. The first essay examines how political connections moderate the relationship between host country attributes and international strategy in a sample of greenfield investments in manufacturing during the 2003-2010 period. The second and third essays examine how political connections directly impact a firm’s international expansion strategies and performance. The second essay investigates the role of different types of political connections on a firm’s international investments amount and risk profile. Finally, the third essay analyzes the role of political connections as an explanatory factor of firms’ ability to accelerate the provision of funding and development of their project finance-based investments. Both the latter two essays rely on an original dataset on various political connections enjoyed by the largest French firms during the 2003-2012 period.

This thesis consists of two parts: Part I (Chapters 2 and 3) critically assesses a set of methodological tools that are widely used in the literature and that are applied to the empirical analysis in Part II (Chapters 4 and 5). Using a randomised experiment, the first chapter compares pen-and-paper interviewing (PAPI) with computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI). We observe a large error count in PAPI, which is likely to introduce sample bias. We examine the effect of PAPI consumption measurement error on poverty analysis and compare both applications in terms of interview length, costs and respondents’ perceptions. Next, we formalise an unproven source of ordinary least squares estimation bias in standard linear-in-means peer effects models. Deriving a formula for the magnitude of the bias, we discuss its underlying parameters. We show when the bias is aggravated in models adding cluster fixed effects and how it affects inference and interpretation of estimation results. We reveal that two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation strategies eliminate the bias and provide illustrative simulations. The results may explain some counter-intuitive findings in the social interaction literature. We then use the linear-in-means model to estimate endogenous peer effects on the awareness of a community-based development programme of vulnerable groups in rural Tanzania. We denote the geographically nearest neighbours set as the relevant peer group in this context and employ a popular 2SLS estimation strategy on a unique spatial household dataset, collected using CAPI, to identify significant average and heterogeneous endogenous peer effects. The final chapter investigates social network effects in decentralised food aid (free food and food for work) allocation processes in Ethiopia, in the aftermath of a serious drought. We find that food aid is responsive to need, as well as being targeted at households with less access to informal support. However, we also find strong correlations with political connections, especially in the immediate aftermath of the drought.

This dissertation discusses three issues. First, we provide a thorough survey of political connections in the essay “A Survey of Political Connection Literature.” Then two empirical studies on political connections are presented in the following two essays, “Do Political Preferences Affect Investor Trading Behavior and Market Reaction?” and “The Relationship between Ownership Structure and the Value of Political Connections: Evidence from the Taiwanese Presidential Election and Global Financial Crisis of 2008,” respectively. Last, we present the conclusions in the final chapter. From the survey in the first essay, the impacts of political connections on firm value and corporate finance issues are discussed. A number of recent studies have found that political connections create value for firms when these connections are considered beneficial. Thus, in the second essay, we are motivated to investigate what kind of stock market investors would take such advantages that increase the value of their portfolio. We are also motivated by the argument in the literature that the officials’ rent-seeking behavior to establish political connections may bear some costs for the firms. Then, in the third essay, we address the question whether the value of political connections is associated with the firms’ managerial ownership structure. We organize our three essays into Chapters 2 to 4, respectively, and we briefly describe these issues below. Chapter 2 provides the theoretical and empirical background of this dissertation. We survey extant research on political connections, with special attention to its importance on corporate finance. First we discuss whether and how political connections affect firm value. Then we turn to the channel through which political connections affect firm value. For instance, political connections help firms obtain more external funds with lower costs, which results in a decline in the required rate of return and an increase in the market value. Studies that discuss the characteristics of politically connected firms are also surveyed in this essay. In Chapter 3, the essay discusses whether or not political preferences bring value to a firm. We approach the issue by checking the share trading and stock returns of politically connected firms during the 2008 Taiwanese Presidential Election. In particular, we classify investors into sophisticated and non-sophisticated investors. The political preference hypothesis is proposed to explore whether the trading behavior of the two types of investors shifts when their favorite political party loses or wins during a Presidential Election. First, a sophisticated investor holds more shares in the firm connected with the winning political party, but has fewer shares in the losing party. However, this may not hold for non-sophisticated investors. Second, firms connected with the winning party exhibit positive stock returns, whereas firms connected with the losing party do not experience the same success. Finally, the increment shares of sophisticated investors in firms connected with the winning party are positively correlated with the stock returns around the time of the election. Specifically, sophisticated investors invest more on firms connected with the winning party, thus obtaining more abnormal returns. However, the results may not hold for non-sophisticated investors. Consequently, foreign investors are found to be sophisticated investors and political preference brings market value to this kind of investors. In Chapter 4, the essay examines the relationship between ownership structure and the value of political connections. We address this issue with the data of Taiwanese publicly-traded firms during the 2008 Taiwanese Presidential Election and the 2008 global financial crisis. First, following the literature, the value of political connections is examined through the positive abnormal stock returns of the winning-party-connected firms during the election. Then we find a negative relationship between the value of political connections and the deviation of management group’s control rights from cash flow rights. Second, using the collapse of Lehman Brothers as an exogenous shock to control for the overall decline in investment opportunity, we find that politically connected firms with managers possessing more excess control rights underperformed in stock returns than firms without such potentially entrenched managers. Thus, studies that do not consider the inverse impacts of potential expropriation tend to present an incomplete picture of the value of political connections.

La tesi consisteix en quatre assaigs sobre les causes i conseqüències de la intervenció del govern en l'economia, i un assaig sobre els efectes de la immigració en el país amfitrió. El primer capítol quantifica els retorns econòmics de les connexions polítiques, i examina els canals a través dels quals aquestes afecten les empreses. El segon capítol estudia la relació entre la confiança entre els individus i les preferències d'aquests per la intervenció governamental, i utilitza aquesta relació per reinterpretar evidència existent sobre els efectes de les regulacions. El tercer capítol examina la substitució entre els mercats financers i les pensions publiques, com a dos alternatives per proveir la jubilació. El quart capítol estima els efectes de la fragmentació política sobre la velocitat de les reformes estructurals, centrant-se en el cas particular de les privatitzacions. Finalment, l'últim capítol investiga empíricament la relació entre immigració i crim. / The thesis collects four essays about the causes and consequences of government intervention in the economy and one essay about the effects of immigration. The first chapter quantifies the private returns and the social costs of political connections. The second chapter studies the relationship between individual trust toward the others and preferences for government intervention, and it draws the implications of this relationship for re-interpreting previous evidence about the effects of regulation. The third chapter examines the substitutability between financial markets and public pensions as two alternative ways to provide for retirement. The fourth chapter estimates the effect of political fragmentation on the timing of structural reforms, focusing in particular on privatization. Finally, the last chapter empirically investigates the relationship between immigration and crime.