This study examines the relationship between corporate managers' political ideology and corporate leverage policies conditional on investor sentiment. Based on a minimum of 21,884 observations over the 1992-2008 period, the authors show that Republican managers significantly reduce leverage...

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of corruption on stock returns in the USA. In particular, this study examines the relationship between corruption in a state (i.e. local corruption) and stock returns of firms headquartered in that state (i.e. local returns)....

Existing research shows that members of Congress made informed trades prior to the passage of the STOCK Act of 2012. There is also evidence in the literature to suggest that the STOCK Act was able to deter politicians from trading based on non-public information. However, the question of whether...

Purpose: What information do members of Congress (politicians) use when they trade stocks? The purpose of this paper is to attempt to answer this question by investigating the relationship between an aggregate measure of trading by members of Congress (aggregate congressional trading) and...

This paper investigates whether members of Congress use private information in their stock transactions. We analyze 61,998 congressional common stock transactions over the 2004-2010 period, and find that the buy-minus-sell portfolios of powerful Republicans outperform the market with abnormal...