Finance

We find that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents– a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio. The difference is economically and statistically significant, does not seem to be due to small sample biases, and is robust in different subsamples. There is a remarkable monotonicity in the difference of returns for size-decile portfolios, from 7 percent for large firms to about 22 percent for small firms. Presidential partisan cycles have a heterogeneous impact on industry returns: the tobacco, telecom, and chemical industries have performed better under Republican presidents, whereas the real estate, construction, and services industries have fared significantly better under Democrats. We test three plausible explanations for these findings. First, the relation might be due to political variables proxying for business-cycle factors. Second, the relation might be attributed to unexpected returns around elections, when information is revealed, rather than to expected returns varying with the political cycle. Lastly, differences in stock market riskiness across presidential regimes could account for the difference in average returns. We reject all three hypotheses. As it stands, the difference in excess returns during Republican and Democratic presidencies is a puzzle that cannot easily be explained. However, the cross-sectional evidence from size-sorted and industry portfolios suggests that the party in the presidency may affect the stock market through differences in fiscal and regulatory policies.

This paper presents a model of bidding strategies in takeovers in which initially uninformed bidders must incur costs to learn their valuations of a target. In the case the the bidders' valuations are independent, the first bidder may make a pre-emptive bid, well above the market price of the shares-he does so o deter the second bidder from investigating. In the case that the bidders' valuations are common, the first bidder may bid low to conceal favourable information. I also investigate the relation between the price at which the target is taken over and he cost of investigation of the second bidder.

This paper supports and extension of the negotiation hypothesis begun in Harris (1991) and calls into question the evidence of implicit collusion developed in Christie and Schultz (1994). This paper documents the distribution of prices per share for initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, and self-tender offers. These markets were selected because they lack the potential for bid-ask collusion. Despite the lack of bid-ask collusion in IPOs, M&As, and self-tenders, prices are often quoted in rounded amounts per share – avoiding quotes ending in add eighths, off quarters, and odd halves. Two new hypotheses are offered to explain the lack of off-eighths quotes and other previously unexplained pricing phenomena.