Social media, political uncertainty, and the stock market

Fan, R., Talavera, O. and Tran, V. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9561-8118 (2020) Social media, political uncertainty, and the stock market. Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, 55. pp. 1137-1153. ISSN 1573-7179 doi: 10.1007/s11156-020-00870-4

Abstract/Summary

This study proposes a new measure of firm-level uncertainty exposure around important political events. More specifically, we construct a degree of (dis)agreement among social media users who jointly mention firms and politicians. We study a sample of over 23 million tweets mentioning both a firm from the S&P 500 composite and ‘Trump’ from October 2016 to May 2017. We then analyze the relationship between the (dis)agreement measure and individual stock features. The results suggest that increased disagreement among such tweets is associated with heightened stock price volatility and trading volume. This link is observed before the US Presidential Inauguration in January 2017 but not afterwards. The finding is confirmed by further robustness checks based on filtered tweets with policy keywords and policy-sensitive industries.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/88906
Identification Number/DOI	10.1007/s11156-020-00870-4
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Henley Business School > Finance and Accounting
Publisher	Springer
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item