Diego Garcia (University of Colorado Boulder)

New Consumption in the Wild

Abstract. We study how market returns shape news consumption, employing 700 million pageviews over 27 months from Australia’s largest financial newspaper, the Australian Financial Review. Aggregate news consumption intensifies on days when the Australian market index decreases, led by a dramatic spike in consumption of markets news. By contrast, firm-specific news consumption declines when the aggregate market moves more (up or down). These findings imply aggregate and firm-specific news are substitutes for one another, consistent with theories of limited attention. These news consumption effects are strongest for fresh news, but they are also present for stale news articles on days when there are no articles about the firm.

Joint with Tony Cookson and Elvis Jarnecic.