Political institutions and the policies they generate play a key role in financial markets. Using the tools of finance, we can better understand the interplay between finance, politics, and macroeconomics. This dissertation presents three essays related to this topic. A summary of each is provided here. The first essay shows democratizations have a large, negative impact on asset valuations driven by a rise in redistribution risk. Across 90 countries over 200 years, risk premia are substantially elevated in democratizations, similar in magnitude to financial crises. Using a shift in Catholic church doctrine in support of democracy, I provide causal evidence that democratizations increase risk premia. Successful democratizations lead to substantial redistribution: the size of the public sector grows, income inequality falls, and the labor share of income rises. A model of asset prices and political regimes in which wealthy asset market participants face redistribution risk in democratizations can quantitatively explain these effects. The model also explains the negligible asset pricing response to autocratizations. Neither an increase in macroeconomic risk nor generic political risk can explain the results. The second essay documents that foreign lobbying shapes US government spending and public policy. We introduce a comprehensive dataset of 180,000 date-stamped, in-person meetings between foreign agents and individual US legislators, spanning 2000 to 2018 and covering 146 countries and 1,200 legislators. We find that (1) meetings are positively related to legislator lawmaking effectiveness and membership to foreign affairs committee and (2) foreign agents maintain connections with legislators even after they depart from important committees. Around these meetings, (3) foreign countries benefit from increased financial aid and advantageous product tariffs and (4) foreign firms whose governments lobby more often benefit from larger subsidies and US government contracts. Finally, we study benefits and costs accruing to legislators and show (5) monetary and electoral benefits, but no evidence that US legislators are punished by their constituents because they meet with representatives of foreign countries. Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S. based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. The third essay revisits this conclusion by incorporating Social Security retirement benefits into measures of wealth inequality. We find that top wealth shares have not increased in the last three decades when Social Security is properly accounted for. This finding is robust to assumptions about how taxes and benefits may change in response to system financing concerns. When discounted at the risk-free rate, real Social Security wealth increased substantially from $4.9 trillion in 1989 to $52.6 trillion in 2019. When we adjust the discount rate for long-run macroeconomic risk, this increase remains sizable, growing from over $4.0 trillion in 1989 to $41.2 trillion in 2019. Consequently, by 2019, Social Security wealth represents 59% of the wealth of the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution.