-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Julian Atanassov, Brandon Julio, Tiecheng Leng, The Bright Side of Political Uncertainty: The Case of R&D, The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 37, Issue 10, October 2024, Pages 2937–2970, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhae023
- Share Icon Share
Abstract
We use close gubernatorial elections as a quasi-natural experiment to document a positive effect of political uncertainty on firm-level R&D. This finding is in contrast to the existing literature documenting a negative impact of political uncertainty on capital investment. We examine potential mechanisms and find that our results are consistent with the growth option view of R&D investment. The effect is stronger for politically sensitive and high-tech industries.The results are robust to different proxies for political uncertainty shocks. As predicted by models of investment under uncertainty, the real effects of political uncertainty critically depend on the type of the investment. JEL G18, G38, O31, O32