With the SEC still sorta thinking about requiring U.S. public firms to disclose their political expenditures, a newly posted paper by Saumya Prabhat and David Primo (of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and University of Rochester, respectively) should be getting some play. Prabhat and Primo claim to find evidence that the U.K.’s enactment of similar disclosure rules in 2000 was bad for shareholders of politically active firms, and they argue this is a reason to oppose possible U.S. reforms. I think they’ve got at least one really big methodological problem, and even taking their results at face value they’re just misinterpreting them.