Exploiting a unique institutional setting in Korea, this paper documents that politicians can increase the amount of government resources allocated through their social networks to the benefit of private firms connected to these networks. After winning the election, the new president appoints members of his networks as CEOs of stateowned firms that act as intermediaries in allocating government contracts to private firms. In turn, these state firms allocate significantly more procurement contracts to private firms with a CEO from the same network. Contracts allocated to connected private firms are executed systematically worse and exhibit more frequent cost increases through renegotiations.A GROWING LITERATURE DOCUMENTS A positive relationship between political connections and firm value for a large set of countries, 1 providing evidence of different benefits that accrue to politically connected firms. 2 While this * David Schoenherr is at Princeton University. I am deeply grateful to my advisor Vikrant Vig for his generous and invaluable guidance. I thank