The connection between stock market prices and political support: evidence from Japan

This study analyzes the causality between stock market prices and political support, with a focus on Japan. Japan offers a critical setting to control for the causality of political connectedness, because electoral institutions proscribe corporate donations and politicians holding concurrent corporate executive positions and corporate donations. By narrowing the causality from stock market trends to political components, a vector autoregressive linear non-Gaussian acyclic model reveals that stock prices are the cause (parent) and ruling party support is the outcome (child).