This paper investigates a little studied but common mechanism that firms use to obtain state favors: business owners themselved seeking election to top office. Using Thailand as a research setting, we find that the more business owners rely on government conccessions or the wealthier they are,...

We document considerable return comovement associated with accruals after controlling for other common factors. An accrual-based factor-mimicking portfolio has a Sharpe ratio of 0.16, higher than that of the market factor or the SMB and HML factors of Fama and French (1993). According to...