[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. Relative to standard control variables, these fixed effects increase the R² by about 35%, indicating each columnist's average persistent "bullishness" or "bearishness." To measure the media's conditional effect, we interact columnist fixed effects with lagged returns. This increases explanatory power by yet another one-third, and identifies amplification or attenuation of prevailing sentiment as a tool used by financial journalists.]

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. Relative to standard control variables, these fixed effects increase the R-super-2 by about 35%, indicating each columnist's average persistent "bullishness" or "bearishness." To measure the media's conditional effect, we interact columnist fixed effects with lagged returns. This increases explanatory power by yet another one-third, and identifies amplification or attenuation of prevailing sentiment as a tool used by financial journalists. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

When banks and firms are connected through interpersonal linkages – such as their respective management having attended college or previously worked together – interest rates are markedly reduced, comparable with single shifts in credit ratings. These rate concessions do not appear to reflect sweetheart deals. Subsequent firm performance, such as future credit ratings or stock returns, improves following a connected deal, suggesting that social networks lead to either better information flow or better monitoring.

We find that a substantial portion of short sellers' trading advantage comes from their ability to analyze publicly available information. Using a database of short sales combined with a database of news releases, we show that the well-documented negative relation between short sales and future returns is twice as large on news days and four times as large on days with negative news. Further, we find that the most informed short sales are not from market makers but rather from clients, and we find only weak evidence that short sellers anticipate news events. Overall, the evidence suggests that public news provides valuable trading opportunities for short sellers who are skilled information processors.