The Political Economy of Antibribery Enforcement

Using exogenous variation in the timing and geographic location of U.S. Congressional elections, we find that the probability of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement actions against foreign firms increases significantly preceding senatorial elections, spiking more than 21%, with no commensurate increase for globally operating domestically headquartered firms in these same senators’ states. Using hand-collected case-level data from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), we observe that these pre-election cases tend to be weaker overall and that they are brought significantly more often against foreign firms that operate in less-important industries in the senator’s state and when they have a smaller overall U.S. presence. This spike in foreign firm targeting is accompanied by a significant spike in traditional and social media coverage coupled with sharply negative sentiment. Furthermore, these enforcement actions and media spikes are associated with electoral consequences, specifically greater vote shares and better poll results for enforcement-state senators. The FCPA enforcement actions have real impacts on firms. These include a 10% reduction in market value after enforcement actions against foreign firms and a significant decrease in credit ratings. This paper was accepted by Will Cong, finance. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00476 .