Whom to vote for? Employees tend to follow their leader
Does your CEO influence your political views? You may be surprised by the staggering and perhaps alarming research findings.
Associate Professor of Finance Ilona Babenko and her research partners looked at eight federal election cycles from 1999 to 2014 and more than 2,000 companies. They found that “employees direct approximately three times more of their campaign contributions to political candidates supported by their firm’s CEO than to otherwise similar candidates.” An article in The New York Times on September 5, 2016:
“When a new CEO contributes to different political candidates from the ones supported by the prior CEO, employees tend to follow his/her lead and redirect their donations as well,” wrote the professors Ilona Babenko, Viktar Fedaseyeu of Bocconi University in Italy, and Song Zhang of the University of Lugano in Switzerland.
Hear Babenko discuss the findings: W. P. Carey Research: The Role of CEOs in Employee Voting from W. P. Carey School on Vimeo.
About Ilona Babenko
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