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 firms' growth strategies? Using administrative data on large capital expenditure projects in India (1995-2024) and exploiting 171 staggered state elections, I apply a real options framework to show that pre-electoral uncertainty produces opposing effects on investment behavior. In a stacked differences-in-differences design, I find firms delay new project announcements by 7% in the three months before elections while simultaneously accelerating existing project completions by a similar magnitude. This divergent response---delay versus accelerate---challenges the conventional view that political uncertainty uniformly depresses economic activity. After elections, firms appear to strategically reallocate capital to curry favor with new leadership: with the incoming chief minister's home district receiving a disproportionate increase in new investment projects. These findings demonstrate that electoral cycles create distinct strategic logics for capital deployment, with firms using both timing and geography as tools for navigating political uncertainty and building access to power.

How do subnational elections shape firms' decisions about where to direct their corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending? Using mandatory CSR disclosures from India spanning 2014--2023 and covering more than 19,000 firms and 680,000 projects, we assemble a firm--state--year panel and exploit the staggered timing of state legislative assembly elections. We argue that elections create competing pressures---increasing political incentives for visible social engagement while also heightening uncertainty---and that which force dominates depends on firms' exposure to the local political environment. We find that home-state elections increase the share of CSR directed to the home state by roughly 10 percentage points, while elections in non-home states reduce both the probability and share of CSR directed there. We find this home-state spike to be driven by new projects in politically salient sectors---education, health, and poverty alleviation---while the non-home decline reflects suppression of new commitments rather than withdrawal of continuing obligations. Close elections sharpen both effects. Drawing on firms' capex presence in non-home states, we find operational presence in non-home states generates home-like election responses, confirming that the key driver is political and economic exposure rather than headquarters status alone. These findings reveal that elections reallocate private social spending across jurisdictions reflecting firms' exposure to local political demands.

Family firms concentrate their borrowing in deep, long-running banking relationships. What happens to them when the bank faces a crisis? We study this question using India's 2015 Asset Quality Review---a shock forcing banks to recognize hidden bad loans---together with novel administrative data covering the near-universe of Indian firms, and employ a within-bank design to compare family and non-family firms borrowing from the same bank. We find that relational depth shields family firms. At stressed banks, incumbent lenders filed up to one additional loan agreement per year with family borrowers than with non-family borrowers, a gap widening over six post-AQR years, and family firms' bank-borrowing share rose by about 15 percent of the pre-AQR baseline, with no higher interest rates: stressed banks extended credit to embedded partners while pulling back from non-family borrowers. But this shield was not costless. Single-bank family firms (those locked into a single lender) saw their return on assets fall by about 3.4 percentage points at stressed relative to unstressed banks, roughly half of the pre-AQR baseline of 7 percent; multi-bank family firms showed no penalty. The mechanism is the lack of lender diversification. Single-bank family firms added fewer new lenders, borrowed less from new sources, and showed the operational fingerprint of withdrawn discipline --- margin compression and working-capital bloat. The cost of embeddedness is not adversarial extraction but foregone market discipline: the monitoring and competition that lender diversification would have imposed.

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.