Betting on Hitler - The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany

Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth

No 5021, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We examine the effect of close ties with the NSDAP on the stock price of listed firms in 1932-33. We consider not only links between the National Socialists and executives, as was common in earlier work, but also with supervisory board members – whose importance is hard to overestimate in the case of German industry. One implication of our work is that, weighted by stock market capitalization in 1932, more than half of listed firms on the Berlin stock exchange had substantive links with the NSDAP. Crucially, stock market investors recognized the value of these links, sending the share prices of connected firms up as the new regime became firmly established. While the market as a whole rose after Hitler’s accession to power, firms with board members known to favour the party (or backing it financially) outperformed the market by 5-10% between January and May 1933. We show that this finding is robust to a range of additional control variables and alternative estimation techniques.

Keywords: market efficiency; Nazi party; political connections; stock market returns (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E60 G14 G18 N24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-fin, nep-his and nep-mac
Date: 2005-04
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP5021.asp (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Betting on Hitler-The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:5021

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP5021.asp

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Address: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 53--56 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DG
Series data maintained by ().