We present a new approach for content analysis to quantify document tone. We find a significant relation between our measure of the tone of 10-Ks and market reaction for both negative and positive words. We also find that the appropriate choice of term weighting in content analysis is at least as important as, and perhaps more important than, a complete and accurate compilation of the word list. Furthermore, we show that our approach circumvents the need to subjectively partition words into positive and negative word lists. Our approach reliably quantifies the tone of IPO prospectuses as well, and we find that the document score is negatively related to IPO underpricing. Disciplines Finance | Finance and Financial ManagementThis journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/fnce_papers/242Word Power: A New Approach for Content Analysis Narasimhan Jegadeesh Di Wu * July 2013ABSTRACT We present a new approach for content analysis to quantify document tone. We find a significant relation between our measure of the tone of 10-Ks and market reaction for both negative and positive words. We also find that the appropriate choice of term weighting in content analysis is at least as important as, and perhaps more important than, a complete and accurate compilation of the word list. Furthermore, we show that our approach circumvents the need to subjectively partition words into positive and negative word lists. Our approach reliably quantifies the tone of IPO prospectuses as well, and we find that the document score is negatively related to IPO underpricing. * Narasimhan Jegadeesh is the Dean's Distinguished Professor at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University, and NBER, email: Jegadeesh@emory.edu This paper presents a new approach to determine the strength of various words in conveying negative or positive tone that is particularly suitable for finance and accounting applications. We objectively determine term weights based on market's reactions to 10-K filings. We apply our approach to determine the relative weights for the words in the lexicon to quantify the tone of 10-Ks.We find several new results with our approach. For much of our analysis, we compute term weights using the positive and negative word list compiled by Loughran and McDonald.Interestingly, the quantitative score that our approach assigns to various 10-Ks have very low correlation with the scores assigned by Loughran and McDonald using the same list of words.1 For example, the Harvard list classifies tax, cost, and liability as words with negative connotation but these words typically have a neutral connotation in finance and accounting.2 Available at http://www3.nd.edu/∼mcdonald/Word Lists.html 2 More importantly, our approach provides a more reliable measure of document tone than the earlier approaches. In particular, we find a significant relation between document tone and market reaction for the positive words, while none of the other papers in the literature have been successful in doing so. Additi...

Using a multitier mapping of supply-chain relationships constructed from granular global, firm-to-firm supplier–customer linkages data, we quantify the degree of financial risk propagation from the supply network beyond firms’ direct supply-chain connections and isolate structural network properties serving as significant moderators of risk propagation. We first document a baseline fact: a significant proportion of tier-2 suppliers are shared by tier-1 suppliers. We then construct two simple metrics to capture the degree of tier-2 sharing and disentangle its effect from tier-2 suppliers’ own risks. We show that the focal firms’ risk levels are significantly related to the proportion of shared tier-2 suppliers in their supply network, and the effect becomes monotonically stronger as their tier-2 suppliers become more highly shared. Finally, we uncover causal relationships behind these associations using a new source of exogenous, idiosyncratic risk events in an event study setting. We show that, as tier-2 suppliers are impacted by these events, focal firms experience negative abnormal returns, the magnitude of which is significantly larger when the impacted tier-2 suppliers are more heavily shared. Overall, our study uncovers the subtier network structure as an important risk source for the focal firm, with the degree of tier-2 sharing as the main moderator. Our results also provide the microfoundation for a common structure in idiosyncratic risks and suggest the importance of incorporating the effect of subtier supply network structure in the portfolio-optimization process. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

We construct an event-based outcome measure of firm-level environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impact for public and private firms globally from 2007 to 2015 using data from RepRisk. Then we measure the societal impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagements using participation in the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) as a proxy. We demonstrate a robust and striking difference between public and private firms: whereas private firms significantly reduce their negative ESG incident levels after UNGC engagements, public firms fail to do so and are more likely to engage in decoupled CSR actions—actions with no subsequent real impact. We then conduct a series of in-depth analyses to examine possible economic mechanisms. Our results are most consistent with shareholder–stakeholder conflicts of interest being the main moderator of decoupling. The intensity of this conflict is further moderated by three factors: ownership type, proximity to final consumers on the value chain, and specific ESG incident types. Other possible mechanisms, such as selective entry into UNGC and heterogeneities in media exposure, country representation, and entry timing, do not survive our analysis. Our results suggest that existing CSR engagements and one-size-fits-all CSR policy mandates might not necessarily lead to better societal outcomes, and a multi-tiered policy targeting different ownership and industry types might be more efficient at maximizing ex post ESG benefits.