Politics, State Ownership, and Corporate Investments.∗ Shashwat Alok y and Meghana Ayyagari z ∗The authors thank Artem Durnev, Amit Seru, Radhakrishnan Gopalan, Kateryna Holland, William Megginson, Nagpurnanand Prabhala, Anjan Thakor, Robert Weiner, and seminar participants at Annual Meetings of the Amer- ican Finance Association (Philadelphia), Olin Brown Bag Seminar Series, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, University of New South Wales, and University of Florida for their helpful comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors or omissions are our own. yAssistant Professor, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India; Email: shashwat
[email protected] zAssociate Professor, School of Business and Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University; Email:
[email protected] Politics, State Ownership, and Corporate Investment Abstract We document evidence of a political investment cycle in the investment decisions of state owned firms by using the constitutionally mandated election schedule in India as a source of exogenous variation in politicians’ incentive to cater to voters. Using a unique project level database of new investments, we find that the number of capital expenditure projects announced by SOEs is higher in election years, especially in districts with close elections and districts with high- ranking politicians. These projects have negative announcement returns suggesting that political influence is value destroying. We do not observe these patterns in a placebo set of non- government firms or in off election cycle years. JEL Classification: G31, G38, D72, D73, P16 Introduction State owned enterprises (SOEs) are a substantial fraction of the corporate sector in both developing and developed countries.1 In OECD countries alone, SOEs employ over 6 million workers and have a combined value close to USD 2 trillion with approximately 76% of the total value concentrated in non-financial sectors (Christiansen(2011)).