Political Contributions and Firm Performance: Evidence from Lobbying and Campaign Donations

The following dissertation contains two distinct empirical essays which contribute to the overall field of Financial Economics. Chapter 1 titles as “Corporate Lobbying, CEO Political Ideology and Firm Performance”. We investigate the influence of CEO political orientation on corporate lobbying efforts. Specifically, we study whether CEO political ideology, in terms of manager-level campaign donations, determines the choice and amount of firm lobbying involvement and the impact of lobbying on firm value. We find a generous engagement in lobbying efforts by firms with Republican leaning-managers, which lobby a larger number of bills and have higher lobbying expenditures. However, the cost of lobbying offsets the benefit for firms with Republican CEOs. We report higher agency costs of free cash flow, lower Tobin’s Q, and smaller increases in buy and hold abnormal returns following lobbying activities for firms with Republican managers, compared to Democratic and Apolitical rivals. Overall, our results suggest that the effects of lobbying on firm performance vary across firms with different managerial political orientations. Chapter 2 titled as “Corporate Lobbying and Labor Relations: Evidence from Employee” Litigations. We utilize employee litigations and other work-related complaints to examine if lobbying firms are favored in judicial process. We gather 27,794 employee lawsuits (after initial court hearing) between 2000 and 2014 and test the relationship between employee allegations and firms’ lobbying strategies. We find that employee litigations increase the number of labor-related bills in our sample. We document that the increase in employee lawsuits may drive firms into lobbying to change policy proposals. We also find robust evidence that the case outcome is different for lobbying firms compared to non-lobbying rivals, which may protect the shareholder wealth in the long run. Our results present that lobbying activities may make a significant difference in employee allegations. Our findings highlight the benefit of building political capital to obtain a biased outcome in favor of politically-connected firms

Political Contributions and Firm Performance: Evidence from Lobbying and Campaign Donations

The following dissertation contains two distinct empirical essays which contribute to the overall field of Financial Economics. Chapter 1 titles as “Corporate Lobbying, CEO Political Ideology and Firm Performance”. We investigate the influence of CEO political orientation on corporate lobbying efforts. Specifically, we study whether CEO political ideology, in terms of manager-level campaign donations, determines the choice and amount of firm lobbying involvement and the impact of lobbying on firm value. We find a generous engagement in lobbying efforts by firms with Republican leaning-managers, which lobby a larger number of bills and have higher lobbying expenditures. However, the cost of lobbying offsets the benefit for firms with Republican CEOs. We report higher agency costs of free cash flow, lower Tobin’s Q, and smaller increases in buy and hold abnormal returns following lobbying activities for firms with Republican managers, compared to Democratic and Apolitical rivals. Overall, our results suggest that the effects of lobbying on firm performance vary across firms with different managerial political orientations. Chapter 2 titled as “Corporate Lobbying and Labor Relations: Evidence from Employee” Litigations. We utilize employee litigations and other work-related complaints to examine if lobbying firms are favored in judicial process. We gather 27,794 employee lawsuits (after initial court hearing) between 2000 and 2014 and test the relationship between employee allegations and firms’ lobbying strategies. We find that employee litigations increase the number of labor-related bills in our sample. We document that the increase in employee lawsuits may drive firms into lobbying to change policy proposals. We also find robust evidence that the case outcome is different for lobbying firms compared to non-lobbying rivals, which may protect the shareholder wealth in the long run. Our results present that lobbying activities may make a significant difference in employee allegations. Our findings highlight the benefit of building political capital to obtain a biased outcome in favor of politically-connected firms

Two Faces of Corporate Lobbying: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

This paper addresses two side effects of corporate lobbying on firm value in the pharmaceutical industry. Employing corporate lobbying and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval data for the period from 1998 to 2013, we find that lobbying firms have a 67.3 percent higher chance that their new prescription drugs are approved by the FDA than non-lobbying firms. On the 3-day window surrounding FDA approval announcements, lobbying firms yield, on average, a 1.1% higher market reaction than non-lobbying peers. However, we also find that insiders in lobbying firms abnormally purchase their own stocks prior to FDA approvals. These opportunistic purchases substantially increase a firm’s litigation risk. Our evidence highlights the ambivalence of lobbying. While lobbying enhances firm value, it also offers an opportunity for insiders to trade their shares first by exploiting private information that eventually hurts firm value

Lobbying in Finance Industry: Evidence from US Banking System

We examine the relationship between corporate lobbying, shareholder-based litigation outcomes, and firm value for financial firms. First, we show that political lobbying lowers the litigation likelihood for financial institutions. Secondly, lobbying firms experience a higher likelihood of having litigation dismissed, and the average settlement amount is significantly lower for lobbying institutions. In addition, shortly after a litigation announcement, lobbying firms experience significantly higher cumulative abnormal returns (CARs), compared to non-lobbying firms. Finally, we show that lobbying firms have higher long-run buy-and-hold abnormal stock returns (BHARs) following lobbying activities. Our results link financial institution lobbying activity with improved legal outcomes and increases in firm value, implying that lobbying may protect financial institutions from reduced firm value through the building of political capital and reducing litigation costs

A runtime heuristic to selectively replicate tasks for application-specific reliability targets

In this paper we propose a runtime-based selective task replication technique for task-parallel high performance computing applications. Our selective task replication technique is automatic and does not require modification/recompilation of OS, compiler or application code. Our heuristic, we call App_FIT, selects tasks to replicate such that the specified reliability target for an application is achieved. In our experimental evaluation, we show that App FIT selective replication heuristic is low-overhead and highly scalable. In addition, results indicate that complete task replication is overkill for achieving reliability targets. We show that with App FIT, we can tolerate pessimistic exascale error rates with only 53% of the tasks being replicated.This work was supported by FI-DGR 2013 scholarship and the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013] under the Mont-blanc 2 Project (www.montblanc-project.eu), grant agreement no. 610402 and in part by the European Union (FEDER funds) under contract TIN2015-65316-P.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Corruption and shadow economy in transition economies of European Union countries: a panel cointegration and causality analysis

Corruption and shadow economy are two critical problems which feed each other and pose an obstacle against the economic development of countries, especially those with weak fundamentals. Central and Eastern European countries have experienced an absolute political and economic transformation after the downfall of the Berlin Wall. This study researches the effect of corruption and rule of law on shadow economy in 11 transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe over the 2003–2015 term with panel cointegration and causality tests considering heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. The cointegration coefficients revealed a complementary interplay between size of shadow economy and corruption. Furthermore, the causality analysis indicated that there was a bilateral causality between control of corruption and shadow economy in all the cross-section units. However, there was a two-way causality between rule of law and shadow economy only in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland and Romania. Furthermore, there was one-way causality from rule of law to shadow economy in Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia

Spatial support vector regression to detect silent errors in the exascale era

As the exascale era approaches, the increasing capacity of high-performance computing (HPC) systems with targeted power and energy budget goals introduces significant challenges in reliability. Silent data corruptions (SDCs) or silent errors are one of the major sources that corrupt the executionresults of HPC applications without being detected. In this work, we explore a low-memory-overhead SDC detector, by leveraging epsilon-insensitive support vector machine regression, to detect SDCs that occur in HPC applications that can be characterized by an impact error bound. The key contributions are three fold. (1) Our design takes spatialfeatures (i.e., neighbouring data values for each data point in a snapshot) into training data, such that little memory overhead (less than 1%) is introduced. (2) We provide an in-depth study on the detection ability and performance with different parameters, and we optimize the detection range carefully. (3) Experiments with eight real-world HPC applications show thatour detector can achieve the detection sensitivity (i.e., recall) up to 99% yet suffer a less than 1% of false positive rate for most cases. Our detector incurs low performance overhead, 5% on average, for all benchmarks studied in the paper. Compared with other state-of-the-art techniques, our detector exhibits the best tradeoff considering the detection ability and overheads.This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program, under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357, by FI-DGR 2013 scholarship, by HiPEAC PhD Collaboration Grant, the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013] under the Mont-blanc 2 Project (www.montblanc-project.eu), grant agreement no. 610402, and TIN2015-65316-P.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Designing and modelling selective replication for fault-tolerant HPC applications

Fail-stop errors and Silent Data Corruptions (SDCs) are the most common failure modes for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. There are studies that address fail-stop errors and studies that address SDCs. However few studies address both types of errors together. In this paper we propose a software-based selective replication technique for HPC applications for both fail-stop errors and SDCs. Since complete replication of applications can be costly in terms of resources, we develop a runtime-based technique for selective replication. Selective replication provides an opportunity to meet HPC reliability targets while decreasing resource costs. Our technique is low-overhead, automatic and completely transparent to the user.This work is supported in part by the European Union Mont-blanc 2 Project (www.montblanc-project.eu), grant agreement no. 610402 and the FEDER funds under contract TIN2015-65316-P.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Orta ve Doğu Avrupa Birliği Ülkelerinde Yolsuzluk, Gelir Dağılımı Eşitsizliği ve Yoksulluk: Panel Nedensellik Analizi

Son yıllarda küresel servet önemli miktarda artmış, gelir dağılımı eşitsizliği ve yoksullukta düşüşler görülmüştür. Bununla birlikte hem gelir dağılımı eşitsizliği hem de yoksulluk hala ciddi boyutlarda bulunmaktadır. Bu çalışma Dumitrescu ve Hurlin (2012) panel nedensellik testini kullanarak Orta ve Doğu Avrupa bölgesindeki Avrupa Birliği geçiş ekonomilerinde 2005-2016 döneminde yolsuzluk, gelir dağılımı eşitsizliği ve yoksulluk arasındaki nedensel etkileşimi araştırmaktadır. Çalışma sonucunda yoksulluktan yolsuzluğa ve gelir dağılımı eşitsizliğinden yoksulluğa doğru tek yönlü nedensellik belirlenmiştir