type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>The media are increasingly recognized as key players in financial markets. I investigate their causal impact on trading and price formation by examining national newspaper strikes in several countries. Trading volume falls 12% on strike days. The dispersion of stock returns...</p>

By reaching a broad population of investors, mass media can alleviate informational frictions and affect security pricing even if it does not supply genuine news. We investigate this hypothesis by studying the cross-sectional relation between media coverage and expected stock returns. We find...

How does competition in firms' product markets influence their behavior in equity markets? Do product market imperfections spread to equity markets? We examine these questions in a noisy rational expectations model in which firms operate under monopolistic competition while their shares trade in...