a b s t r a c tWe examine whether investor mood, driven by World Health Organization (WHO) alerts and media news on dangerous infectious diseases, is priced in pharmaceutical companies' stocks in the United States. We argue that disease-related news (DRNs) should not trigger rational trading. We find that DRNs have a positive and significant sentiment effect among investors (on Wall Street). The effect is stronger (weaker) for small (large) companies, who are less (more) likely to engage in the development of new vaccines. A potential negative investor climate (on Main Street)induced by disease-related feardoes not alter the positive sentiment effect.

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This paper studies the relationship between the agency problem, financial performance and corruption from country, industry and firm level perspectives. First, we observe that companies operating in countries with a high level of corruption tend to display relatively low returns. Second, in an industry-by-industry context, we find that the negative relationship between corruption and average stock returns is stronger in specific industries, which\ud we define as ‘corruption sensitive’. Third, at the firm level, we show that agency problems are exacerbated in corruption-sensitive industries. Our study builds on the existing literature in three main areas. First, it proposes a novel macro-based approach aimed at identifying corruption-sensitive industries. Second, it provides evidence supporting that corruption exacerbates agency conflicts. Third, it provides evidence on the generalizability of standard corporate governance predictions to companies operating in corruption-sensitive industries

We propose three novel measures of policy-related uncertainty based on the volume of Google searches for (i) 'US stock market'; (ii) 'US politics'; (iii) 'US Fed'. In a VAR context, we find that a Google-search-based uncertainty shock has sizable adverse effects on US macroeconomic conditions. In particular, it produces (i) a drop in industrial production, consumer sentiment, equity prices, long-term rates and consumer credit; (ii) a rise in the unemployment rate. These effects are nearly identical to those generated by a shock to a standard policy-related uncertainty indicator. Our empirical findings suggest that a rise in the volume of internet searches for economic policy-related topics is a symptom of increasing uncertainty. It turns out that the proposed Google-search-based metrics meet standard policy-related uncertainty indicators.