 Political uncertainty, corruption, and corporate cash holdingsShashitha Jayakody, David Morelli and Jaideep Oberoi Journal of Corporate Finance, 2023, vol. 82, issue C Abstract: Exposure to political corruption and political uncertainty separately demands opposing risk management responses: to reduce cash to minimize expropriation and to increase cash to hedge policy risk. We study how local political corruption and political uncertainty interact in their impact on corporate cash holdings within the United States. We find robust evidence that firms located in states with higher corruption scores react to increases in local political uncertainty by increasing cash holdings more than those in less corrupt settings. This behavior suggests that firms in more corrupt settings find it expedient to raise cash to facilitate influence of officials in the face of local political risk. We find further support for this conclusion by showing that politically engaged firms respond to our measure of political risk by increasing cash and increasing spending on campaign contributions. Our findings point to a potential channel through which different jurisdictions experience the entrenchment and persistence of corruption. Keywords: Cash holdings; Local corruption; Influence; Political risk (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:corfin:v:82:y:2023:i:c:s0929119923000962 DOI: 10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2023.102447 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Corporate Finance is currently edited by A. Poulsen and J. Netter More articles in Journal of Corporate Finance from Elsevier |
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