Political Ties of Big Businesses in Time: A Multigenerational View from South Korea

Francis Kim, Indian School of Business

This paper uses an unconventional source of evidence, marriage records of multi-generational business families, to examine their informal networking behavior over different political regimes in time. I find the inverse U shape in the frequency of political networking to peak at the late industrialization period under the military dictatorship, suggesting that political ties within family ties appear to have filled the “institutional voids” in the emerging market context. An event study around their wedding dates at daily level shows investors react especially to their political marriages with supra-normal returns, demonstrating the economic significance of these informal human networks.

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 Presented in Session 140. Elites Networks: Business, Politics, and Civil Society