Using a news-based index of aggregate policy uncertainty in the US economy, we document a strong negative relation between policy uncertainty and corporate risk-taking. We show that high levels of policy uncertainty are associated with significantly lower future stock return volatility at the...

We explore a long standing prediction in the international business literature that managers' subjective perceptions of political risk – not just the level of risk – are important for how firms manage political risk. The importance attributed to political risk by corporate executives has...

Nowadays, non-financial corporations invest heavily in financial assets, questioning the traditional boundaries of non-financial firms. We investigate how economic policy uncertainty affects firms' holding of non-currency financial assets and portfolios of such assets in China. We find that...

Risk is a vital concept to grasp when investing in a firm or project. It is also a key ingredient required to evaluate the cost of capital and perform a valuation. An organization’s capital structure, specifically the amount of leverage and debt financing employed, must be accounted for to...

In this paper, we study how legal uncertainty affects economic activity. We develop a parsimonious model with different types of legal uncertainty that reduce economic activity and that can be classified as idiosyncratic (i.e., diversifiable) or systematic (i.e., nondiversifiable). We test the...

Previous studies show that economic policy uncertainty has been rising steadily since the 1960s (Baker et al. 2014), and that this secular increase has led to harmful economic outcomes such as reduced investment rates (Gulen and Ion 2016). Other studies find that politically connected directors...

This study proposes a new approach that bridges the asset pricing implications of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and the dynamic debt-financing decisions of Chinese firms. The approach introduces a new variable, firm-level policy risk (FLPR), in empirical tests. FLPR embraces two elements,...

This article explores the economic effects of checks and balances on corporate investment and employment. I use U.S. gubernatorial election results from 1978 to 2010 as a source of exogenous variation in whether the party controls both the executive and the legislative branch (unified...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of economic policy uncertainty on firms' investment decisions. We focus on Spain for the period 1998-2014. To measure policy-related uncertainty, we borrow the economic policy uncertainty (EPU) indicator available for this country. We find...

Using the policy uncertainty index of Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2013), we document a strong negative relationship between firm-level capital investment and the aggregate level of uncertainty associated with future policy and regulatory outcomes. More importantly, we find evidence that the...