Firms use active political strategies not only to mitigate uncertainty emanating from legislative activity, but also to enhance their growth opportunities. We find that the impact of such policy uncertainty on systematic risk (beta) can be hedged away by employing various political strategies...

Firms located in more disaster-prone counties adopt more conservative leverage policies than those in less disaster-prone counties. Compared to peers in the least disastrous areas, firms in the most disastrous areas are less levered by 3.6 percentage points, equivalent of foregoing $13.47...

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' proximity...