【报告主题】Social media and the cost of debt financing: Evidence from stock forum text analysis
【主讲嘉宾】Joseph Zhang，The University of Memphis
【报告时间】2023年10月19日 14:00
【报告地点】会计学院108室
【内容提要】
This study is to examine whether small investors’ social media activity is helpful for predicting subsequent bond credit spreads. We use extensive data of posts/comments on the internet stock message board – EastMoney Stock Forum thirty days prior to bond issuance announcement date to identify its predictive power and find that the number of posts/comments is negatively related to issuance spreads. We further find that information quality improvement of posts increases this predictive ability, and that posts directly related to issuers’ fundamentals and/or debt financing drive our main results. Additional tests show that the informational production role of social media activity is more pronounced when there is a greater demand for information quality. More interestingly, we find that social media activity is also related to bond covenants and bond issue size.