The Impact of Earnings Season on Election Day

Abstract

U.S. presidential elections always fall in the middle of the third-quarter earnings season. We leverage establishment-level location data and voter-level survey data to provide evidence on the impact of local earnings news on voter perceptions and behavior for the six U.S. presidential elections held between 2000 and 2020. We show that better earnings news released before Election Day has an economically meaningful impact on individuals' propensity to vote for the incumbent party's presidential candidate. By contrast, earnings news released after Election Day does not have the same effect. We conclude that corporate earnings announcements serve as a relevant, salient, and reliable signal influencing voter perceptions of an administration's economic performance at a critical time in the election cycle.

Keywords: Earnings Announcements, Information Environment, Economic Voting, U.S. Presidential Elections