Front-Page News: The Effect of News Positioning on Financial Markets

Abstract

This paper estimates the effect of news positioning on the speed of price discovery, using exogenous variation in prominent (“front-page”) positioning of news articles on the Bloomberg terminal. Front-page articles see 240% higher trading volume and 176% larger absolute excess returns during the first 10 minutes after publication than equally important non-front-page articles. Overall, the information in front-page articles is fully incorporated into prices within an hour of publication. The response to non-front-page information of similar importance eventually converges but takes more than two days to be fully reflected in prices.