En décembre 1888, la Compagnie de Panama fait faillite après une année mouvementée. Quelques années plus tard, une enquête officielle permet de découvrir un vaste réseau de corruption impliquant d’éminents hommes politiques et journalistes. En raison de difficultés structurelles de financement, la société avait émis de nouveaux titres le 26 juin 1888, afin d’obtenir des liquidités. Pour s’assurer une participation massive à cette émission de titres, elle a soudoyé plusieurs journaux pour publier de fausses informations valorisantes au sujet de sa santé et de ses perspectives financières. À l’aide de données sur la couverture moyenne et la position des médias concernant la Compagnie, nous nous demanderons si la campagne de presse massive menée pour soutenir l’émission du 26 juin a eu un impact sur le comportement des investisseurs. Nos conclusions indiquent que les investisseurs ont réagi de manière contre-intuitive et ont vendu leurs actifs à mesure que la société bénéficiait d’un traitement médiatique de plus en plus positif. Ces résultats ouvrent un champ à de futures recherches sur les activités de délits d’initié et sur la quantité d’informations entre les mains des investisseurs à la Bourse de Paris.
The decade of the 1880s was a turbulent period for the French Third Republic. Corruption scandals that discredited republican parties and a lacklustre economic performance after the Paris Bourse crash of 1882 gave rise to widespread public disenchantment with the republican political elites. The rise of the Boulangist movement was the most representative example of this disillusionment. In 1887, Georges Boulanger, an army general and former minister of war, began orchestrating a populist mass campaign against the ruling republicans and the parliamentary regime. His political agitation, supported by a heterogeneous coalition of socialists, radicals and royalists, reached a climax in January 1889, when, after winning a Paris by-election, he had an opportunity to stage acoup d’état, which did not materialise. To understand whether French investors perceived the Boulangist campaign as a real threat to their interests, I use an original dataset of daily stock prices to analyse the effect of the January 1889 by-election on the value of politically connected firms listed on the Paris Bourse. The results show that firms with links to the republican parties experienced positive cumulative abnormal returns after Boulanger's refusal to stage the coup, while there was no effect on firms connected to the royalist parties or with no political ties. These findings suggest that French investors reacted positively to the prospective subsiding of the Boulangist movement.
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