We examine whether politicians affect local firms’ industrial pollution, and whether such effects are transmitted through plant-level networks to affect pollution in other regions. We first document that close Democrat wins in U.S. congressional races are associated with lower emissions and higher abatement at the plant level, especially when politicians have strong pro-environmental preferences. We also find evidence of reallocation: firms shift emissions away from areas represented by Democrats. However, reallocation is imperfect: firm-level costs are higher and market-to-book ratios lower if firms’ representation is more Democratic. Lower pollution-related illnesses around plants in Democratic districts suggest pass-through effects on local communities.

We examine the effects of chief executive officer (CEO) turnover in banks. Incoming bank CEOs face problems of information asymmetry because banks’ operations are opaque and bank risk can change dramatically in a short time. These CEOs may therefore change bank policies to manage their personal risks. Since CEO turnover is usually endogenous, we utilize a setting in which CEO turnover is based solely on retirement age and is thus exogenous to bank performance. Consistent with our thesis, incoming CEOs increase provisioning for future delinquencies and shrink lending. Bank stock prices decline following these changes. Politically motivated lending or ever-greening cannot explain our results.

We provide microeconomic evidence on ethnic frictions and market efficiency, using dyadic data on managers and borrowers from a large Indian bank. We conjecture that, if exposure to religion-based communal violence intensifies intergroup animosity, riot exposure will lead to lending decisions that are more sensitive to a borrower’s religion. We find that riot-exposed Hindu branch managers lend relatively less to Muslim borrowers and that these loans are less likely to default, consistent with riot exposure exacerbating taste-based discrimination. This bias is persistent across a bank officer’s tenure, suggesting that the economic costs of ethnic conflict are long-lasting, potentially spanning across generations.