< Back to previous page

Project

Capital Market Effects of Information Dissemination on Social Media.

This project will investigate the capital market consequences of firms disseminating information through social media channels. The use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter is proliferating at an incredible pace. Many firms nowadays make use of social media as an additional channel to communicate with customers and (potential) investors. Despite the explosion of firm and investor use of social media, academic interest in the potential capital market consequences of firms' social media usage has been very limited. This research project is motivated by the relative paucity of academic research on this topic, and by the shortcomings of the few prior studies that have been conducted in this area. Therefore, the first objective of the proposed research project is to focus on a sample of firm-generated (rather than user-generated) social media messages from a broad sample of firms. As a second objective this research project will examine the capital market effects of the tone and readability of such firm-generated social media messages (as opposed to merely focusing on the number of such messages). The third objective of the research project is to account for the interactive nature of social media (i.e. users can redistribute firm-generated social media messages) when considering capital market consequences. In order to achieve these aims, the proposed research project will employ cross-sectional regressions and event studies to analyze the "tweets" (i.e. messages on Twitter) of all S&P 1500 firms.
Date:1 Oct 2016 →  30 Sep 2020
Keywords:DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION, SOCIAL MEDIA, CAPITAL MARKETS, INFORMATION ASYMMETRY
Disciplines:Applied economics, Business administration and accounting, Communication sciences, Journalism and professional writing, Media studies, Other media and communications