Politician’s Equity Holdings and Corporate Social Responsibility

This study examines the relationship between politician’s equity holdings and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of companies. Politician equity holdings reflect not only the self-interested investment activity of firms, but also a potential source of benefit to the firm as politicians naturally pursue their self-interest through pro-firm legislative and regulatory activity. These investments come at the cost, however, of increased public scrutiny and political monitoring over the firm’s activities. Using politician equity holding data and CSR data for a sample of S&P 1500 firms, we find evidence that firms respond to politician equity holdings through both increased CSR strengths and concerns, suggesting that both social pressure and politician interventions are motivating firm CSR behavior. These findings are robust to the use of alternative models which account for potential endogeneity concerns

Politician’s Equity Holdings and Corporate Social Responsibility

This study examines the relationship between politician’s equity holdings and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of companies. Politician equity holdings reflect not only the self-interested investment activity of firms, but also a potential source of benefit to the firm as politicians naturally pursue their self-interest through pro-firm legislative and regulatory activity. These investments come at the cost, however, of increased public scrutiny and political monitoring over the firm’s activities. Using politician equity holding data and CSR data for a sample of S&P 1500 firms, we find evidence that firms respond to politician equity holdings through both increased CSR strengths and concerns, suggesting that both social pressure and politician interventions are motivating firm CSR behavior. These findings are robust to the use of alternative models which account for potential endogeneity concerns.Paz10_Politician_s_equity.pdf: 144 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020

The Effect of Politician Stock Ownership on Corporate Tax Strategy

We examine the relation between politician stock ownership and corporate tax strategy. Specifically, we examine whether politicians’ direct stock ownership as a measure of politician-initiated corporate political connections (CPC) is associated with companies’ tax aggressiveness. Using hand-collected data on U.S. politicians’ stock ownership, we find that companies’ tax aggressiveness is not affected by the incidence of politician stock ownership. This contrasts with prior research on tax aggressiveness when political connections are directly initiated by the company. However, we find that the concentration of politician stockholders within a company is strongly associated with tax aggressiveness. This evidence suggests that companies engage in more aggressive tax strategies when they anticipate lower expected costs stemming from a critical mass of politician stock owners. We also find increased tax aggressiveness when politician stockholders have more legislative influence, stronger alignment of economic interests with the company, or when the company is headquartered in the politician’s home state. Moreover, politician-induced tax aggressiveness is incremental to the tax avoidance associated with company-initiated CPC gained through corporate campaign contributions. Taken together, our evidence suggests that concentrated politician stock ownership plays an important role in determining companies’ tax strategies and that this mechanism is incremental to other forms of corporate political connections

Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project.

We report the generation and analysis of functional data from multiple, diverse experiments performed on a targeted 1% of the human genome as part of the pilot phase of the ENCODE Project. These data have been further integrated and augmented by a number of evolutionary and computational analyses. Together, our results advance the collective knowledge about human genome function in several major areas. First, our studies provide convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in primary transcripts, including non-protein-coding transcripts, and those that extensively overlap one another. Second, systematic examination of transcriptional regulation has yielded new understanding about transcription start sites, including their relationship to specific regulatory sequences and features of chromatin accessibility and histone modification. Third, a more sophisticated view of chromatin structure has emerged, including its inter-relationship with DNA replication and transcriptional regulation. Finally, integration of these new sources of information, in particular with respect to mammalian evolution based on inter- and intra-species sequence comparisons, has yielded new mechanistic and evolutionary insights concerning the functional landscape of the human genome. Together, these studies are defining a path for pursuit of a more comprehensive characterization of human genome function