Integrated market and nonmarket strategies: Political campaign contributions around merger and acquisition events in the energy sector
研究了受监管行业的企业如何通过政治竞选捐款影响监管机构对并购的审批，以保护并购带来的经济租金不被监管者侵蚀。
We examine how firms use political strategies to protect economic rents created by mergers and acquisitions against dissipation by regulators. In regulated industries, regulators can impose costly merger conditions, for instance consumer rate reductions in the utilities sector, thereby reducing shareholder gains. We investigate empirically whether and how firms use election campaign contributions to politicians as a method of influencing regulatory merger approvals. In a statistical analysis of campaign contributions by all electric utilities from 1998 to 2006, we find that utilities increased their contributions in the year before they announced a merger and that merging utilities increased their contributions more in states with greater political party competition. Our findings contribute to political strategy research by providing novel evidence that firms integrate market and nonmarket strategies . Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.