We construct a monthly Presidential Economic Approval Rating (PEAR) index from 1981 to 2019, by averaging ratings on president’s handling of the economy across various national polls. In the cross-section, stocks with high betas to changes in the PEAR index significantly under-perform those...

Time series momentum (TSM) refers to the predictability of the past 12-month return on the next one-month return and is the focus of several recent influential studies. This paper shows that asset-by-asset time series regressions reveal little evidence of TSM, both in- and out-of-sample. While...

Disagreement measures are known to predict cross-sectional stock returns but fail to predict market returns. This paper proposes a partial least squares disagreement index by aggregating information across individual disagreement measures and shows that this index significantly predicts market...

Labor organizations mobilize employees for political purposes. In this study, we examine how labor unions stimulate political polarization within firms. We combine datasets on employee-level political contributions and union elections in the United States. In a regression discontinuity design,...

I document a positive relationship between partisan conflict and corporate credit spreads. A onestandard deviation increase in partisan conflict is associated with a 2.61 basis point increase inthe next one-month corporate credit spreads after controlling for bond issue information,...