Revolving door and favouring future employers
Canayaz, Martinez and Ozsoylev have a nice paper showing that the pernicious effect of the revolving door (at least in the US) is largely about government employees favouring their future private sector employers. It is not so much about government employees favouring their past private sector employers or about former government employees influencing their former colleagues in the government to favour their current private sector employers.
Their methodology relies largely on measuring the stock market performance of the private sector companies whose employees have gone through the revolving door (in either direction) and comparing these returns with a control group of companies which have not used the revolving door. The abnormal returns are computed using the Fama-French-Carhart four factor model.
The advantage of the methodology is that it avoids subjective judgements about whether for example, US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson favoured his former employer, Goldman Sachs, during the financial crisis of 2008. It also avoids having to identify the specific favours that were done. The sample size also appears to be reasonably large – they have 23 years of data (1990-2012) and an average of 62 revolvers worked in publicly traded firms each year.
The negative findings in the paper are especially interesting, and if true could make it easy to police the revolving door. All that is required is a rule that when a (former) government employee joins the private sector, a special audit would be carried out of all decisions by the government employee during the past couple of years that might have provided favours to the prospective private sector employer. In particular, the resistance in India to hiring private sector professionals to important government positions (because they might favour their former employer) would appear to be misplaced.
One weakness in the methodology is that companies which anticipate financial distress in the immediate future might hire former government employees to help them lobby for some form of bail out. This might ensure that though their stock price declines due to the distress, it does not decline as much as it would otherwise have done. The excess return methodology would not however show any gain from hiring the revolver because the Fama French excess returns would be negative rather than positive. Similarly, companies which anticipate financial distress might make steps (for example, campaign contributions) that make it more likely that their employees are recruited into key government positions. Again, the excess return methodology would not pick up the resulting benefit.
Just in case you are wondering what all this has to do with a finance blog, the paper says that “[t]he financial industry, ... is a substantial employer of revolvers, giving jobs to twice as many revolvers as any other industry.” (Incidentally, Table A1 in their paper shows that including or excluding financial industry in the sample makes no difference to their key findings). And of course, the methodology is pure finance, and shows how much information can be gleaned from a rigorous examination of asset prices.
Posted at 3:43 pm IST on Wed, 24 Jun 2015 permanent link
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