We use exogenous scheduling of Wall Street Journal columnists to identify a causal relation between financial reporting and stock market performance. To measure the media's unconditional effect, we add columnist fixed effects to a daily regression of excess Dow Jones Industrial Average returns....

We find that a small set of financial columnists has a causal effect on short-term aggregate stock market prices. For some journalists ("bulls") the market reaction is consistently positive, whereas for others ("bears") it is negative. Because bulls and bears are rotated exogenously in our...

This paper documents that the path of credit spreads since a firm's last loan influences the level at which it can currently borrow. If spreads have moved in the firm's favor (i.e., declined), it is charged a higher interest rate than justified by current fundamentals, and if spreads have moved...

We find that a firm's investment is highly sensitive to the investments of other firms headquartered nearby, even those in very different industries. It also responds to fluctuations in the cash flows and stock prices (q) of local firms outside its sector. These patterns do not appear to reflect...