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

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,...

This paper investigates how banks and finance companies operate in a family business group. Using uniquely detailed ownership data from Thailand, we find that the controlling families extensively use pyramids to control banks and finance companies and assign different lending strategies across...

This paper shows that marriage can function in a similar way as mergers and acquisitions. To set up alliances that would benefit the firms, a controlling family would encourage their children to marry a person from a politically or economically powerful family. To test this hypothesis, we...