“Forthcoming”:http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~snaidu/papers/coups.pdf (PDF) from Arin Dube, Ethan Kaplan and Suresh Naidu, at the _Quarterly Journal of Economics._
bq. We estimate the impact of coups and top-secret coup authorizations on asset prices of partially nationalized multinational companies that stood to bene?fit from US-backed coups. Stock returns of highly exposed ?firms reacted to coup authorizations classi?fied as top-secret. The average cumulative abnormal return to a coup authorization was 9% over 4 days for a fully nationalized company, rising to more than 13% over sixteen days. Pre-coup authorizations accounted for a larger share of stock price increases than the actual coup events themselves. There is no effect in the case of the widely publicized, poorly executed Cuban operations, consistent with abnormal returns to coup authorizations reflecting credible private information. We also introduce two new intuitive and easy to implement nonparametric tests that do not rely on asymptotic justi?fications.
Somehow, I suspect that it isn’t the easy-to-implement nonparametric tests that will be getting public attention.