While lobbying of Congress receives much attention, government agencies control key decisions. Companies extensively lobby agencies, and this contributes to increases in firm value around regulatory announcements. Lobbying on both bills and related agency rules yields 30-70% higher benefits than lobbying on bills only. Compared to lobbying of Congress: the propensity to lobby agencies and the associated benefits are concentrated on technical issues, and ‘what you know’ is relatively more important than ‘who you know’. Firms that lobby agencies experience negative abnormal returns following shocks that decrease agency power (the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision) or decrease a firm’s lobbying capacity.

We demonstrate that foreign geopolitical risk can affect U.S. firm productivity through

their immigrant employees. Using confidential U.S. Census employee-employer matched

microdata, we measure a firm’s labor exposure to foreign geopolitical risk (FGPR)

based on geopolitical shocks to the origin countries of its immigrant employees. FGPR

significantly boosts firm labor productivity, profitability, and investment. The effect

appears causal, operates on the intensive margin rather than through labor turnover,

and is robust among firms without international trade activities. Examining the mechanism at the worker level, we find that immigrants increase their working hours when

origin-country GPR rises, which positively spills over to their domestic coworkers’ labor supply. These effects are consistent with two underlying forces: a reduced option

value of return migration and increased remittance motives when origin-country GPR

rises. Overall, our study highlights a novel labor channel through which foreign GPR

pressures immigrant employees but benefits their employing firms

We develop a model of competitive financial markets in which investors hold opposing political preferences and firms choose political stances that generate non-pecuniary payoffs. In equilibrium, firms cater to the investor group with the greatest impact on their stock price, leading to endogenous corporate polarization and distorted risk sharing. Partisan firms generally have lower expected stock returns than politically neutral firms, and the minimum difference increases with financial costs of partisanship. Valuemaximizing political stances coincide with the utilitarian first best when cash flows are uncorrelated; with correlated cash flows, market incompleteness generically leads value maximization to diverge from welfare maximization.