Cosmin Cioanta
About me
I am a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. My primary fields of research are Finance, Politics, Corporate Governance, and International Business. Specifically, I am interested in lobbying, insider backgrounds, and competition dynamics, with a focus on ESG/CSR and political risk information transmission in the financial markets.
Research interests
Education
Working papers
I am a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. My primary fields of research are Finance, Politics, Corporate Governance, and International Business. Specifically, I am interested in lobbying, insider backgrounds, and competition dynamics, with a focus on ESG/CSR and political risk information transmission in the financial markets.
Research interests
- Corporate Governance, Politics and Finance, International Finance, Mergers and Acquisitions, ESG , Textual Analysis
Education
- PhD in Finance, University of Georgia (2017–2022)
- Chair: Jeffry Netter
- BBA Finance and International Business, University of Georgia (2013-2017)
- Visiting scholar at Trinity College, University of Oxford (2015)
- Certificate in Legal Studies
Working papers
- (Job market paper) Lobbying, Benefits and Costs of Trying to Stay Ahead (Link)
- Using all bill lobbying observations from the United States Congress during 2005-2019, this paper investigates how the combination of a lobbying firm’s attitude, need, and visibility, defined by ex-ante political sentiment, political risk, and count of lobbied bills, impacts political risk mitigation, taxation, investor uncertainty, innovation, corporate governance quality, and fund flows. The combination of political risk exposure and sentiment creates four categories of firms for likely lobbying: Proactive, Reactive, Natural, and Ignorant. Proactives are optimistic towards lobbying with low need to lobby to address political risk, Reactives are less optimistic towards lobbying with an increased need, Naturals have high need and sentiment, and Ignorants have low need and sentiment. I find that lobbying can reduce political risk exposures, decrease investor uncertainty, improve effective tax rates, and hurt corporate governance ratings. Additionally, past lobbying actions can either provide experience that helps, or draw unwanted political attention to the firm.
- Reaching Across the Aisle, a Mutual Win (Link)
- The ability to work with multiple parties while resisting peer pressures from one's own political party, known as reaching across the aisle (RATA), has become less frequent as the U.S political realm is increasingly polarized. This paper looks at the relation between a politician's political voting characteristics and subsequent demand for being hired to the board of directors. Additional connections among the politician's hiring and the market's reaction, dynamics of lobbying and corporate governance, and firm's financial performance are explored. I find RATA voting increases the chance of being hired to the board, SP1500 companies with high RATA voting politicians outperform their peers, and Non-SP1500 firms benefit from high Polar voting politicians.