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Discretionary Dissemination On Twitter, Richard M. Crowley, Wenli Huang, Hai Lu

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using an unsupervised machine learning approach to analyze 12.8 million tweets posted by S&P 1500 firms from 2012 to 2016, we find that firms tweet more financial information around significantly negative or positive earnings announcements or accounting filings. Specifically, we observe a symmetric U-shaped relation between the number of financial tweets and the materiality of accounting information events. This relation is consistent with the theoretical prediction in Hummel et al. (2018) which assumes that managers are sensitive to their firm’s fundamental value. We document that this relation also holds for hyperlink usage in tweets about financial information around important events, …