The political connection influence on Brazilian business group diversification

Abstract

The theoretical approach based on political economics is shown to provide alternative explanations for the phenomenon of business group diversification in Brazil in relation to the approach based on transaction costs economics. Business donations to election campaigns are used as a proxy for political connections to test the political economics approach compared to the mainstream transaction costs approach. A regression model is elaborated on a fixed effect panel with a sample of 760 observations of 95 business groups in 8 years in Brazil. Strong evidence for using the political economics approach is found as a plausible alternative explanation for the diversification of Brazilian business groups. These results contribute towards showing the evidence of political issues on the preferred organizational corporate strategy for diversified companies in Brazil.