We study the relation between CEO and employee campaign contributions and find that CEO-supported political candidates receive three times more money from employees than the candidates not supported by the CEO. This relation holds around CEO departures, including plausibly exogenous departures...

Individuals dominate money in politics, accounting for over 90% of federal campaign contributions, yet studies of individuals' giving patterns are scarce. We construct a new dataset to examine all of the contributions made between 1991 and 2008 by all 2,198 people who served as S&P 500 CEOs for...