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per se than in using such outes as a proxy measure of the expectations of economic actors regarding political decisions. Similarly, William Bernhard and David Leblang consider the impact of politics and political uncertainty on daily market behavior in several advanced democracies. Unlike most analyses, theirs considers outes in multiple asset markets, including currencies, equities, and government bonds. Bernhard and Leblang’s aim, however, is to explore the consequences of discrete political events—such as elections and cabi formations—on capital markets, rather than to assess the broader impact of public policy and institutions on capital market outes. This article seeks to round out the literature on financial globalization by exploring the linkages between equitymarket outes and national government policies and institutions. Its contribution is both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, we elaborate on the politics of equitymarket performance, focusing in particular on the effects of government policies and institutions on stockmarket valuations. We rely on the relatively developed literature on foreign direct investment and sovereign bond markets to underscore the distinctiveness of equitymarket reactions to government policies. Empirically, we conduct a novel evaluation of the correlates of totalmarket, pricetoearnings ratios (P ? E) for a sample of up to 37 developed and emerging market countries during the 1985–2020 period. Crosssectional and timeseries crosssectional (TSCS) analyses reveal that levels of democracy, market liquidity, shareholder rights, and capitalaccount liberalization are positively associated with equitymarket valuations, while real interest rates are negatively associated. We also find that investors are positively disposed toward equity markets in emergingmarket countries, and negatively disposed toward markets with high dividend payout ratios. Interestingly, many of the political and economic factors—including inflation, and fiscal policy—deemed highly salient to investors in other financial markets are not statistically associated with stockmarket valuations. These results are robust to the inclusion of a number of control variables, including capitalasset pricing model (CAPM) factors and alternative pricing model considerations. Note that the responses of investors to policies and institutions also have implications for future government policy choices. For instance, if a nation’s economy relies more heavily on FDI than on sovereign lending or bank financing, its government may face few pressures to reduce public spending. On the other hand, if a government relies heavily on the bond market to finance its expenditur