The Power of the Street: Evidence from Egypt’s Arab Spring
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SSRN-id2485984.pdf
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472.54 KB
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Author(s)
Hassan, Tarek A.
Tahoun, Ahmed
Acemoglu, K. Daron
Date Issued
August 2017
Journal
The Review of Financial Studies
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Citation
Acemoglu, Daron et al. “The Power of the Street: Evidence from Egypt’s Arab Spring.” The Review of Financial Studies 31, 1 (August 2017): 1–42 © 2017 The Author(s)
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Unprecedented street protests brought down Mubarak’s government and ushered in an era of competition between three rival political groups in Egypt. Using daily variation in the number of protesters, we document that more intense protests are associated with lower stock market valuations for firms connected to the group currently in power relative to non-connected firms, but have no impact on the relative valuations of firms connected to rival groups. These results suggest that street protests serve as a partial check on political rent-seeking. General discontent expressed on Twitter predicts protests but has no direct effect on valuations.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/RFS/HHX086
