The Impacts of Political Connections and Ownership Structure on Firm Value

This dissertation discusses three issues. First, we provide a thorough survey of political connections in the essay “A Survey of Political Connection Literature.” Then two empirical studies on political connections are presented in the following two essays, “Do Political Preferences Affect Investor Trading Behavior and Market Reaction?” and “The Relationship between Ownership Structure and the Value of Political Connections: Evidence from the Taiwanese Presidential Election and Global Financial Crisis of 2008,” respectively. Last, we present the conclusions in the final chapter. From the survey in the first essay, the impacts of political connections on firm value and corporate finance issues are discussed. A number of recent studies have found that political connections create value for firms when these connections are considered beneficial. Thus, in the second essay, we are motivated to investigate what kind of stock market investors would take such advantages that increase the value of their portfolio. We are also motivated by the argument in the literature that the officials’ rent-seeking behavior to establish political connections may bear some costs for the firms. Then, in the third essay, we address the question whether the value of political connections is associated with the firms’ managerial ownership structure. We organize our three essays into Chapters 2 to 4, respectively, and we briefly describe these issues below. Chapter 2 provides the theoretical and empirical background of this dissertation. We survey extant research on political connections, with special attention to its importance on corporate finance. First we discuss whether and how political connections affect firm value. Then we turn to the channel through which political connections affect firm value. For instance, political connections help firms obtain more external funds with lower costs, which results in a decline in the required rate of return and an increase in the market value. Studies that discuss the characteristics of politically connected firms are also surveyed in this essay. In Chapter 3, the essay discusses whether or not political preferences bring value to a firm. We approach the issue by checking the share trading and stock returns of politically connected firms during the 2008 Taiwanese Presidential Election. In particular, we classify investors into sophisticated and non-sophisticated investors. The political preference hypothesis is proposed to explore whether the trading behavior of the two types of investors shifts when their favorite political party loses or wins during a Presidential Election. First, a sophisticated investor holds more shares in the firm connected with the winning political party, but has fewer shares in the losing party. However, this may not hold for non-sophisticated investors. Second, firms connected with the winning party exhibit positive stock returns, whereas firms connected with the losing party do not experience the same success. Finally, the increment shares of sophisticated investors in firms connected with the winning party are positively correlated with the stock returns around the time of the election. Specifically, sophisticated investors invest more on firms connected with the winning party, thus obtaining more abnormal returns. However, the results may not hold for non-sophisticated investors. Consequently, foreign investors are found to be sophisticated investors and political preference brings market value to this kind of investors. In Chapter 4, the essay examines the relationship between ownership structure and the value of political connections. We address this issue with the data of Taiwanese publicly-traded firms during the 2008 Taiwanese Presidential Election and the 2008 global financial crisis. First, following the literature, the value of political connections is examined through the positive abnormal stock returns of the winning-party-connected firms during the election. Then we find a negative relationship between the value of political connections and the deviation of management group’s control rights from cash flow rights. Second, using the collapse of Lehman Brothers as an exogenous shock to control for the overall decline in investment opportunity, we find that politically connected firms with managers possessing more excess control rights underperformed in stock returns than firms without such potentially entrenched managers. Thus, studies that do not consider the inverse impacts of potential expropriation tend to present an incomplete picture of the value of political connections