An Anatomy of Firms’ Political Speech

Pablo Ottonello, Wenting Song and Sebastian Sotelo

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: We study the distribution of political speech across U.S. firms. We develop a measure of political engagement based on firms’ communications (earning calls, regulatory filings, and social media) by training a large language model to identify statements that contain political opinions. Using these data, we document five facts about firms’ political engagement: (1) Political engagement is rare among firms; (2) Political engagement is concentrated among large firms; (3) Firms tend to specialize in specific topics and outlets; (4) Large firms tend to engage in a wider set of topics and outlets; (5) The 2020 surge in firms’ political engagement was associated with an increase in the engagement of medium-sized firms and a change in the mix of political topics.

Keywords: Firm dynamics; Market structure and pricing; Recent economic and financial developments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 D63 G41 L11 L20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2024-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-big, nep-ind and nep-sbm
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Related works:
Working Paper: An Anatomy of Firms’ Political Speech (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocawp:24-37

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