Back in 2010, Art Durnev published a short paper, The Real Effects of Political Uncertainty: Elections and Investment Sensitivity to Stock Prices, available here.  The article studies the interaction between national elections and corporate investment.  Today is not a national election — we get two more years before we have to choose our next president — but it’s still seems like an apt day to think about the role of elections on corporate activity.

The most interesting part of the article, to me anyway, is the test of the relationship between political uncertainty and firm performance. As the article explains, 

If prices reflect future profitability of investment projects, investment-to-price sensitivity can be interpreted as a measure of the quality of capital allocation. This is because if capital is  allocated efficiently, capital is withdrawn from sectors with poor prospects and invested in profitable sectors. Thus, if political uncertainty reduces investment efficiency, firm performance is likely to suffer. Consistent with this argument, we show that firms that experience a drop in investment-to-price sensitivity during election years perform worse over the two years following elections.

The conclusion: this signifies that political uncertainty significantly impacts real economic outcomes.  Therefore, “political uncertainty can deteriorate company performance because of inferior capital allocation.”

So, it’s election day.  Please vote, regardless of your views.  Voting is a right, a privilege, and duty. And if you’re in charge of a firm’s investment decisions, consider this study.  As we approach the next national election, you might want to be wary of dropping your investment-to-price sensitivity leading up to the next election.  If you do, odds are your firm will do worse in the two years following the election. 

And, while we’re talking presidential politics, here’s another study worth considering: Effects of Election Results on Stock Price Performance: Evidence from 1980 to 2008.  Here’s the abstract (and, please, go vote!):

We analyze whether the results of the 1980 to 2008 U.S. presidential elections influence the stock market performance of eight industries and we examine factors that are expected to affect firms’ stock returns around these elections. Our empirical analysis reflects firms’ exposure to government policies in two ways. First, to determine whether investors presume any Democratic or Republican favoritism towards or biases against certain industries we perform an event study for each of the eight industries around the eight elections. Second, we include the firms’ marginal tax rate as proxy for the firms’ exposure to uncertainty about fiscal policy in a regression analysis. We do not find a consistent pattern in industry returns when comparing the effect of Democratic versus Republican victories. However, the extent of the reaction differs among industries. The victory of a Democratic candidate rather negatively influences overall stock returns, while the results are rather mixed for Republican victories. Furthermore, a change in presidency from either a Democratic to a Republican candidate or from a Republican to a Democratic candidate causes stronger stock market effects than re-election or the election of a president from the same party. We also find that the firms’ marginal tax rate is positively correlated with abnormal stock price returns around the election day. The results are relevant for academics, investors and policy makers alike because they provide insight on the question whether stock market participants respond to expected changes in policy making as a result of presidential elections.