Prof. Francesco Trebbi

Investing in Influence

Institutional ownership of US corporations has increased ten-fold since 1950. In a recent study Francesco Trebbi, together with M. Bertrand, M. Bombardini and R. Fisman, have examined whether these new concentrated owners influence portfolio firms’ political activities, as a window into the larger question of whether institutional investors can wield their control to extract benefits from portfolio firms. The researchers determined that after the acquisition of a large stake, a firm’s political action committee (PAC) giving mirrors more closely that of the acquiring investment management company. Overall, their findings suggest that corporations’ political business strategies are likely dictated by broader considerations than simple profit, and modeling corporate influence should take into account how corporations are governed.
Mr. Trebbi’s academic research focuses on Political Economy and Applied Microeconomics, broadly defined. He has worked on political institutions and their design, elections and political campaigns, behavior in legislatures, campaign finance, lobbying, regulation, and banking. He has also worked on topics related to the political economy of development, corruption, patronage, ethnic politics, and intra-state conflict.
At CES he will present new applied work in Political Economy. Hopefully these presentations will include both reduced form and structural form approaches, allowing him to showcase a variety of methodologies in this active research area.
Francesco Trebbi is the Bernard T. Rocca Jr. Chair and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business. He is also an NBER Research Associate, where he co-directs the NBER Political Economy Program (POL), and also a CEPR Research Fellow. Before joining UC Berkeley, he was Canada Research Chair and Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia Vancouver School of Economics from and Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University.