Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), the leading data research platform and business intelligence tool for corporate, academic and government institutions worldwide, is pleased to announce Jeffrey R. Brown, the Josef & Margot Lakonishok Professor of Business and Dean, and Jiekun Huang, Associate Professor of Finance at Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, as winners of the WRDS Best Paper Award at the Western Finance Association. A part of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, WRDS provides global corporations, universities and regulatory agencies the thought leadership, data access and insights needed to enable impactful research.

Their paper, “All the President’s Friends: Political Access and Firm Value” used public data from White House visitor logs during the Obama presidency to show that corporate executives’ visits to the White House are associated wth positive stock price reactions. The new level of transparency ushered in under the Obama administration provided the novel data set and opportunity to connect political access with firm value.

“WRDS is pleased to present the WRDS Best Paper Award to Professors Brown and Huang for their efforts to understand the impact that corporate visits to the White House have on firm value,” said Robert Zarazowski, Managing Director of WRDS. “This project used a novel data set to examine a critical question about access and impact, and I congratulate both researchers for their innovative work.”

“Jiekun and I are truly grateful to WRDS for this Best Paper Award,” said Jeffrey R. Brown. “It is exciting to have our work recognized like this, and to be able to advance important conversations about firm access and impact.” Read more about the prestigious award »