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11 J. Legal Analysis 1 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/jlegan11 and id is 1 raw text is: THE POLITICS OF CEOs Alma Cohen*, Moshe Hazant, Roberto Tallaritat and David Weiss5 ABSTRACT This article studies the political preferences of chief executive officers (CEOs) of public companies. We use Federal Election Commission records to compile a comprehensive database of the political contributions made by more than 3800 individuals who served as CEOs of Standard & Poor's 1500 companies between 2000 and 2017. We find a sub- stantial preference for Republican candidates. We identify how this pattern is related to the company's industry, region, and CEO gender. In addition, we show that companies led by Republican CEOs tend to be less transparent to investors with respect to their political spending. Finally, we discuss the policy implications of our analysis. (JEL Codes: G3, G34, G38, K2, and K22). 1. INTRODUCTION Chief executive officers (CEOs) of public companies preside over a significant fraction of the American economy and wield substantial power over a majority of the assets held by business firms. Their power over corporate resources, as well as their significant stature and prestige in the economic system, enables public-company CEOs to have significant influence over policy and political decisions. In this article, we argue that understanding the political preferences * Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, USA. Tel-Aviv University Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv, Israel. NBER, Cambridge, MA, USA. ECGI Brussels, Belgium. CEPR London, UK. Email: alcohen@law.harvard.edu t Berglas School of Economics, Tel-Aviv University Tel Aviv, Israel. CEPR, London, UK. I Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, USA. § Berglas School of Economics, Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. This article is part of the work of the Project on Corporate Political Spending of the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance. We would like to thank Lucian Bebchuk and Itay Saporta, the editor, and anonymous referees for valuable comments and discussions. We have also benefitted from invaluable research assistance by Shay Acrich, Omer Braun, Zoe Piel, and Ewelina Rudnicka. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business and the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School, the Israel Science Foundation, and Tel-Aviv University. ( The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard Law School. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact joumals.permissions@oup.com doi:10.1093/jla/lazOO2

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