This paper examines corporate tax evasion from both a financial and governance perspective: one, the impact of tax evasion on a multinational (MNC)'s financial performance and secondly, whether corporate governance levels affect the probability of the multinational committing tax evasion. We specifically address: (i) whether MNCs suffer any adverse short and long-term effects on their financial performance following news that the firm in question has committed, or is suspected of committing, tax evasion and (ii) whether firm and country level governance has any influence on the likelihood of MNCs evading tax. In the short-term, we find that share prices drop in the event window around the announcement date. Further, we find evidence that multinationals do not suffer long-term reputational damage from tax evasion (unless there is repeated media follow-up); leaving no impact on firm profitability or value. We also find that a small number of firm level governance, tax-efficiency based governance and country governance measures have a significant relationship with an MNC's likelihood to commit tax evasion.

We document asymmetric announcement effects of consumer sentiment news on United States stock and stock futures markets. While a negative market effect occurs upon the release of bad sentiment news, there is no market reaction for the counterpart good news. This supports the “negativity effect” hypothesis. Notably, this effect seems most likely to occur in salient stocks, which is consistent with the availability heuristic.

We document asymmetric announcement effects of consumer sentiment news on United States stock and stock futures markets. While a negative market effect occurs upon the release of bad sentiment news, there is no market reaction for the counterpart good news. This supports the “negativity effect” hypothesis. Notably, this effect seems most likely to occur in salient stocks, which is consistent with the availability heuristic.

This paper examines the equity market reaction to the monthly release of Australian consumer sentiment news. Our results indicate that consumer sentiment has valuable information content. Further, we document a version of the “negativity effect” (from the psychology literature) in which, upon announcement of bad (good) sentiment news, the equity market experiences a significant negative (no) announcement day effect. Notably, we find that the market recovers from the bad news shock relatively quickly post-announcement. The results are robust to a broad range of additional tests.