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Diego Garcia (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

15 November 2017 @ 12:00

 

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Date:
15 November 2017
Time:
12:00
Event Category:
Event Tags:

“The kinks of financial journalism”

Abstract

This paper studies the content of financial news as a function of past market returns.  As a proxy for media content we use positive andnegative word counts from general financial news columns from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Our empirical analysis allows us to discriminate between theories that predict hyping good stock performance to those that emphasize negative news. The evidence is conclusive: negative market returns taint the ink of typewriters, while positive returns barely do. Given how pervasive our estimates are across multiple time periods, subject to different competitive pressures in the market for news, we conclude our results are driven by demand considerations.