This paper uses event study methodology to measure whether firms that gave soft money to political parties received excessively high rates of returns from their contributions. We measure the excess returns of firms that gave large amounts of soft money and firms that gave no soft money, and...

A possible explanation for the rise of the incumbency advantage in U.S. elections asserts that party and incumbency are close informational substitutes. A common claim in the literature is that, as the salience of partisan cues decreased, voters attached themselves to the next available piece of...