We show that political geography has a pervasive effect on the cross-section of stock returns. We collect election results over a 40-year period and use a political alignment index (PAI) of each state's leading politicians with the ruling (presidential) party to proxy for local firms’...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how non-finance departmental involvement in the management of exchange rate risks impacts the extent of foreign exchange speculation in non-financial firms. Design/methodology/approach – Non-financial firms in a small open economy...

This study investigates whether stock price performance contains a sizeable component that emanates from local sports sentiment. We measure sports sentiment by the performance of sports teams from the four major professional sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL) that are based nearby firms’...

We show that firm headquarters’ geographic proximity to political power centers (state capitals) is associated with higher abnormal returns. Consistent with the notion that this effect is rooted in social network links, we find it is more pronounced in communities with high levels of...

We investigate whether and how well firms' stock market valuations reflect their employees' collective skills and effectiveness relative to that of their industry peers and competitors. We devise a relative stock market valuation measure of human capital intangibles (EVHC) and find that...