Sukrit Singh Puri

Why do firms participate in politics? Scholars tend to assume instrumental intent behind corporate political activity, describing firms as making profit-maximizing investments in the political arena. However, I show that for the most common type of firm in the world, the family firm, non-economic incentives may shape its politics. I argue a family's control over corporate resources and its embeddedness in social networks predict the family firm to deviate from a purely opportunistic political strategy, and instead reflect social motivations and kinship ties. I assemble the universe of corporate campaign contributions to political parties in India from 2003-2021 and develop a new measure of family involvement in firm operations by using demographic details from a company's board of directors. I find that despite operating in a competitive multi-party environment, family firms tend to loyally support a single co-ethnic political party, with little evidence that this strategy pays dividends in the form of private political favors. These findings update our priors on why we think corporations participate in politics in the first place, provide a new explanation for why corporate returns to politics remain elusive, and highlight the need to examine a firm's internal structure to understand its political activity.

This paper investigates hidden corporate political activity using a rare and high-profile disclosure event in India. From 2018 onwards, firms could anonymously donate to political parties via ``electoral bonds.'' A 2024 Supreme Court ruling banned the practice and retroactively revealed details of all $2 billion of previously hidden donations. We link these data to a newly assembled dataset of disclosed contributions going back to 2003 and firm-level administrative records to examine how the introduction of an opaque channel changes the dynamincs of corporate campaign finance. We present four main findings. First, anonymous giving dwarfs disclosed contributions. Second, more sophisticated firms select into the hidden channel. Third, firms giving in secret behave more strategically: giving more often, in larger amounts, and to multiple parties. Fourth, losing anonymity is costly: when donors were unmasked, their stock prices experienced sharp abnormal underperformance, driven by negative press following the reveal, and consistent with a theory of reputational taint that accrues from participating in politics. This study offers rare empirical insight into the scale and consequences of dark money, and highlights the incentives firms face in choosing whether to stay in the shadows.

The study of money in politics has largely remained restricted to developed countries, where data are more readily available. But the concerns about corporate political funding, and how business influences the state broadly, are a global phenomenon. I collect all donations to political parties in India between 2003-2021, by taking advantage of a successful Right to Information Act that require all political parties to disclose donations made above Rs 20,000 (approx 250 USD). By developing a web-scraping based entity resolution algorithm that outperforms conventional exact and fuzzy string matching techniques, I am able to uniquely identify the universe of over 7000 corporate donors making donations to 40 political parties over the 18 year period. In this paper, I describe the steps taken to construct this dataset, describe a set of five stylized facts about the nature of corporate-political linkages in the world's largest democracy, and highlight a set of empirical puzzles that challenge expectations from the literature and invite future scholarship on this topic.

How do elections affect private entrepreneurial investments? Using unique administrative data capturing rich details on how firms in India make long term capital expenditure decisions and taking advantage of staggered state-level elections from 1998-2023, I show causal evidence of how electoral cycles affect entrepreneurial activity on several temporal and spatial dimensions. I find, first, that elections dampen risk appetite: in states going to polls, new firm formation and new investment announcements slow down in the months leading up to elections. Second, while new entrepreneurial activity stalls, firms tend to speed up existing projects to completion just before elections. Finally, by examining political turnovers, I find that after a new chief minister is appointed, investments to the new CM's districts pick up. Overall, these patterns make the case that local politics matters for several aspects of strategic decision-making, and highlights how uncertainty and then certainty of who holds political power affects how entrepreneurs allocate long-term capital.

The 2013 update to the Companies Act in India required all large corporates to spend 2% of trailing three-year net profit on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). In this project, we examine granular project-level CSR spending data and use staggered state-level elections to study how political influence may shape when, where, and how firms allocate their CSR budgets.

A detailed multi-wave survey of family businesses in India probing the nature and extent of family involvement in corporate governance, strength of social and ethnic attachments of the controlling family, and series of market and non-market decisions of the firm, inlcuding hiring, financing, political participation. Currently in pilot.