Topic: News Consumption in the Wild
Speaker: Tony Cookson, Professor of Finance, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado - Boulder
Time: 10:00am-11:30am, May 8
Location: 4-101
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.
Speaker Biography:
Tony Cookson is a Professor of Finance and faculty director for the MS in Finance program at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado - Boulder.
Tony is a Montana native. After earning his bachelor's degree in economics and master's degrees in Statistics and Applied Economics from Montana State University, he received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Chicago. He has been on faculty at University of Colorado since 2013.
His research is empirical and covers a wide range of topics in finance and economics. His research makes use of unique data sets and empirical settings to study how households and corporations make financial decisions. Through his research, Dr. Cookson has become an expert on how investors use social media, the casino industry, the political economy of Native American reservations, and the consequences of the fracking revolution for households. His research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, and Management Science. He is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Financial Economics and Financial Management.
Since 2022, he is a director of the Financial Research Association, which organizes a prominent academic finance research conference in Las Vegas annually.
