Conference Programme

Do investors shape what firms lobby on? Investors holding stakes across multiple firms face a distinctive policy challenge: regulatory outcomes affect them at the portfolio level, not just at the level of any individual firm. Research on corporate political activity has largely focused on firm-specific drivers, with less empirical attention to whether and how investor-owners shape political priorities. Drawing on research showing that investors influence portfolio firms' strategic behavior through governance, signaling, and engagement, we argue that common owners align portfolio firms' lobbying because portfolio-level policy influence produces gains no single firm could capture. Consistent with this argument, we find that common ownership is positively associated with lobbying similarity between firms. The effect is amplified for firm pairs in highly regulated industries, and common ownership also raises the overall intensity of political engagement. Distinct investor types are associated with distinct issue emphases: venture capital and angel investors with environmental lobbying, hedge funds with tax lobbying, and private equity with innovation and intellectual-property lobbying. We use mergers between investors as a quasi-exogenous shock to rule out alternative explanations. Our study contributes to literatures on corporate political activity and common ownership and brings private firms into focus as politically consequential actors.