We use differences in firm outcomes around the 1929 financial market crash to test whether network connections to other firms through executive and directors increase value. We find that firms that had more connections on the eve of the crisis in 1928 have higher 10-year survival rates during...

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 shows that stocks of truly local firms have returns that exceed the return on stocks of geographically dispersed firms by 70 basis points per month. By extracting state name counts from annual reports filed with the SEC on form 10-K, we distinguish firms with business operations in...

This paper studies the effect of sentiment on asset prices during the 20th century (1905 to 2005). As a proxy for sentiment, we use the fraction of positive and negative words in two columns of financial news from the New York Times. The main contribution of the paper is to show that,...

In this technical appendix we extend the results in the paper “Information sales and strategic trading.” We study the problem of a monopolist selling information to a set of risk-averse traders. We first analytically reduce the seller's problem to a simple constrained optimization, allowing...

This paper studies the content of financial news as a function of past market returns. As a proxy for media content we use positive and negative word counts from general financial news columns from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Our empirical analysis allows us to discriminate...

We study the classical problem of raising capital under asymmetric information. Following Myers and Majluf (1984), we consider firms endowed with assets in place and riskier growth opportunities. When asymmetric information is concentrated on assets in place (rather than growth opportunities),...