[1] Behind Closed Doors: Presidential Meetings and Strategic Public Disclosure
I examine what drives the president’s strategic disclosure of what they are working on and its capital-market implications. Using Presidential Daily Diaries, I reconstruct the president’s minute-by-minute schedule from 1935 through 2009. I use government records and an LLM to identify the policy issues each meeting participant is working on and infer potential meeting topics from that work. I then use the LLM to identify topics in presidential public communications and measure their similarity to potential meeting topics. I find that presidential public communications more closely reflect what the president is working on when issues are important to voters. Presidents give greater public emphasis to issues facing opposition from the other party but less emphasis to issues that divide their own party. I also find greater subsequent uncertainty at the firm and market levels when public communication less closely matches potential meeting topics. This association is stronger among firms with greater exposure to government demand, and it is attenuated following private presidential access. Together, these findings are consistent with voluntary disclosure theory in that presidents weigh political costs and benefits when choosing what to communicate publicly, and suggest that these decisions shape the supply of political information to capital markets.