The Value of Political Geography: Evidence from the Redistricting of Firms

We demonstrate that political geography has value to firms. We do so by exploiting shocks to political maps that occur around redistricting cycles in the United States. At one extreme, these shocks keep some firms in congressional districts that are largely unchanged and, at the other extreme, reassign some firms to largely different sets of constituents. Our main finding is that firms suffer from being reassigned to districts that are competitive across parties relative to safer districts. The effects are not trivial in magnitude. Moreover, they do not depend on whether firms continue to be represented by the same politician after the next election.