Using a survey of 800 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in 22 emerging economies, we show that CEOs' management styles and philosophies vary with the ownership and governance structure of their firms. Founders and CEOs of firms with greater family involvement display a greater stakeholder focus, and feel more accountable to employees and banks than to shareholders. They also have a more hierarchical management approach, and see their role as maintaining the status quo rather than bringing about change. In contrast, CEOs of non-family firms emphasize shareholder-value-maximization. Finally, firm-level variation in ownership is as important in explaining management philosophies as cross-country or industry-level differences.

We use party-identifying language—like “liberal media” and “MAGA”—to identify Republican users on the investor social platform StockTwits. Using a difference-in-difference design, we find that partisan Republicans remain relatively unfazed in their beliefs about equities during the COVID-19 pandemic, while other users become considerably more pessimistic. In cross-sectional tests, we find Republicans become relatively more optimistic about stocks that suffered the most during the COVID-19 crisis, but more pessimistic about Chinese stocks. Finally, stocks with the greatest partisan disagreement on StockTwits have significantly more trading in the broader market, explaining 28% of the increase in stock turnover during the pandemic.

Republicans start more firms than Democrats. In a sample of 40 million party‐identified Americans between 2005 and 2017, we find that 5.5% of Republicans and 3.7% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time‐varying—Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations, amounting to a partisan reallocation of 170,000 new firms over our 13‐year sample. We find sharp changes in partisan entrepreneurship around the elections of President Obama and President Trump, with the strongest effects among the most politically active partisans: those that donate and vote.

We document political sentiment effects on U.S. inventors. Democratic inventors are more likely to patent (relative to Republicans) after the 2008 election of Obama but less likely after the 2016 election of Trump. These effects are at least twice as strong among politically active Democrats and are present even within firms and within firm$ × $technology. We also show that partisans tend to cluster in technologies (e.g., Democrats in Biotechnology and Republicans in Weapons), so that sentiment effects aggregate to more patents in the technologies dominated by the winning party.