Who Benefits from Coups?
18 April 2011 at 9:06 am Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
Not surprisingly — private interests:
Coups, Corporations, and Classified Information
Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, Suresh Naidu
NBER Working Paper No. 16952, April 2011We estimate the impact of coups and top-secret coup authorizations on asset prices of partially nationalized multinational companies that stood to benefit from US-backed coups. Stock returns of highly exposed firms reacted to coup authorizations classified as top-secret. The average cumulative abnormal return to a coup authorization was 9% over 4 days for a fully nationalized company, rising to more than 13% over sixteen days. Pre-coup authorizations accounted for a larger share of stock price increases than the actual coup events themselves.There is no effect in the case of the widely publicized, poorly executed Cuban operations, consistent with abnormal returns to coup authorizations reflecting credible private information. We also introduce two new intuitive and easy to implement nonparametric tests that do not rely on asymptotic justifications.
In what can only be a pure coincidence, the following item appeared just below the NBER paper in my RSS reader: “Halliburton Profit More Than Doubles.”
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Classical Liberalism, Financial Markets, Public Policy / Political Economy, Recommended Reading.
Organizations and Markets 
1.
enrique mir | 18 April 2011 at 9:16 am
bastiat and the entrepaneurial class…..