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What information do members of Congress (politicians) use when they trade stocks? The purpose of this paper is to attempt to answer this question by investigating the relationship between an aggregate measure of trading by members of Congress (aggregate congressional trading) and future stock market returns.

The authors follow the empirical framework used in academic work on corporate insiders. In particular, they aggregate 61,998 common stock transactions by politicians over the 2004–2010 period and estimate time series regressions at a monthly frequency with heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation robust t-statistics.

The authors find that aggregate congressional trading predicts future stock market returns, suggesting that politicians use economy-wide (i.e. macroeconomic) information in their stock trades. The authors also present evidence that aggregate congressional trading is related to the growth rate of industrial production, suggesting that industrial production serves as a potential channel through which aggregate congressional trading predicts future stock market returns.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to document a relationship between aggregate congressional trading and stock market returns. The media and scholarly attention on politicians’ trades have mostly focused on the question of whether politicians have superior information on individual firms. The results from this study suggest that politicians’ informational advantage may go beyond individual firms such that they potentially have superior information on the overall trajectory of the economy as well.

Congress passed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012, vesting the Securities and Exchange Commission with the clear legal authority to prosecute members of Congress (politicians) if they engage in insider trading. This paper aims to investigate whether members of Congress are informed traders even before they get elected to Congress, and thus helps assess whether the STOCK Act was a necessary piece of legislation.

This study compares the performance of politicians’ portfolios before and after they are elected to Congress using data from the 2004-2010 period. The authors use an event-study method to construct transactions-based calendar-time portfolios and use standard asset pricing models including capital asset pricing model (CAPM) to determine whether these portfolios earn abnormal returns (i.e. outperform the market).

The authors find weak and inconsistent evidence of abnormal returns in politicians’ portfolios that precede their election. They also find that it takes two consecutive terms in Congress for members to start making informed trades that earn themselves abnormal returns. However, these abnormal returns only accrue to those who serve on powerful committees.

The results in this paper provide support for the STOCK Act of 2012 by showing that members of Congress become informed traders while they serve in Congress. However, these results do not imply any wrongdoing for members of Congress, because the paper uses the pre-STOCK Act data (2004-2010 period).

This study is the first academic work that compares politicians’ portfolios before and after they get elected.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of corruption on stock returns in the USA. In particular, this study examines the relationship between corruption in a state (i.e. local corruption) and stock returns of firms headquartered in that state (i.e. local returns).

This paper uses the Fama–MacBeth two-step regressions. In the first step, the authors estimate the coefficients on the market, size, value and momentum factors for individual stocks. In the second step, they use those coefficients along with the corruption score of the state where stocks are headquartered to explain stock returns.

This paper finds that corruption in a state adversely affects stock returns of firms headquartered in that state. It further documents that the effect of corruption on stock returns is limited to geographically concentrated firms.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to document the effect of state-level corruption on individual stock returns in the USA using the Fama–MacBeth regressions. This study contributes to the literature by documenting the effect of local corruption on local stock returns in a low corruption country.

This paper aims to analyze Islamic rates of return, conventional interest rates in the Malaysian deposit markets, and Kuala Lumpur Interbank Offered Rate (KLIBOR) rates in the short-term money market from the view point of co-movement and transmission.

The non-stationary time series models such as cointegration and Granger causality tests are applied to analyze the daily data.

Islamic rates of return and conventional interest rates co-move in the Malaysian deposit market. The Islamic rates of return propel conventional interest rates in the three-, six-, and 12-month maturities. Islamic rates of return and conventional interest rates form a short-term money market with KLIBOR rates.

The author analyzes econometrically the sample period from May 16, 2005 to January 12, 2012. This paper concentrates on the period after the development of Islamic banking in Malaysia.

Islamic and conventional deposit markets are competitive in Malaysia; in particular, the competition in the one-month deposit market is very keen. Islamic rates of return have more impact on the formation of short-term interest rates than conventional interest rates.

This paper makes three contributions to the related literatures. First, it uses daily data in the maturities of one month, three months, six months and 12 months for its analyses. Second, it uses the Granger causality method of Toda and Yamamoto to avoid the issue of the non-stationarity of the data. The results of the Granger causality tests in this paper are different from related literatures. Third, this paper focuses on the relationship of KLIBOR rates and Islamic rates of return, and of KLIBOR rates and conventional interest rates.