Privatization in India is mostly limited to the diffuse sale of minority stakes in firms. Since control rights have not been transferred to private owners it is widely contended that the process has had little impact on firm behavior. We find however that even the sale of minority stakes has a...

We examine whether bilateral political relations can explain investment and trade flows between the United States and other countries. We treat political relations as endogenous using instrumental variable analysis and investigate whether an exogenous shock to political relations, the 2003 war...

This paper investigates the influence of incumbent firms on the decision to allow foreign direct investment into an industry. Based on data from India's economic reforms, the results suggest that firms in concentrated industries are more successful at preventing foreign entry, that state-owned...

Pursuing delinquent borrowers requires considerable effort, and creditors may lack the incentive to exert this costly effort in uncompetitive banking sectors. To examine this, we use a uniquely large dataset of public and private corporate bankruptcy filings spanning a banking-sector reform that...

Political news is known to be polarized, but standard explanations for polarization do not apply to financial news. Nevertheless, we find strong evidence of political polarization in the tone and coverage of corporate financial news. In particular, we find that the tone of corporate financial...

We investigate the influence of political and financial factors on the decision to privatize government-owned firms using firm-level data from India. We find that the government significantly delays privatization in regions where the governing party faces more competition from opposition...

Does corporate lobbying simply add value by allowing firms to communicate expert information to policy makers, or does it also add value by facilitating potentially illegal quid pro quo arrangements, where lawmakers receive private benefits in exchange for favorable policy decisions? Using the...

While privatization of state-owned enterprises has been one of the most important aspects of the economic transition from a centrally planned to a market system, no transition economy has privatized all its firms simultaneously. This raises the question of whether governments privatize firms...