In this paper, we examine the role of political connections in mitigating the detrimental impact of policy uncertainty on banks. Our estimates show that banks are more cautious when facing policy uncertainty, but that the effect is partially alleviated when banks are politically connected. For an increase of one standard deviation in policy uncertainty, connected banks maintain a loss provision to loan volume ratio that is almost seven percent lower compared to their unconnected peers. These findings are robust to a geographical regression discontinuity setting, as well as to a placebo test. Lastly, the mitigating role of political connections is driven mainly by smaller banks and periods of stricter banking regulations.

在本文中，我们研究了政治联系在减轻政策不确定性对银行的不利影响方面的作用。我们的估计表明，银行在面临政策不确定性时会更加谨慎，但当银行在政治上有联系时，这种影响会得到部分缓解。对于政策不确定性增加一个标准差的情况，联网银行的损失拨备与贷款量之比比未联网银行低近 7%。这些发现对于地理回归不连续性设置以及安慰剂测试都是稳健的。最后，政治关系的缓解作用主要是由较小的银行和更严格的银行监管时期驱动的。