Donald Trump’s Twitter-based power over individual stocks may be diminishing — though a visit to the White House may still do the trick.
According to a recent working paper posted on the National Bureau of Economic Research, companies whose executives visited the White House performed about 0.9 percentage points better than the larger market in the two months following a visit.
Jeffrey Brown and Jiekun Huang, both professors of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studied nearly 2,300 meetings between White House officials and company executives of S&P 1,500 firms between 2009 and 2015.
“We also find evidence suggesting that following meetings with federal government officials, firms receive more government contracts and are more likely to receive regulatory relief,” the study’s abstract reads.
Access to the higher levels of government may also allow company executives to better predict with political uncertainties, wrote the two researchers in a Politico article.
The executive who visited the White House the most? David Cote, CEO of Honeywell International, who visited the White House 30 times through the course of Obama’s presidency.