News Dissemination and Investor Attention

We examine how investor attention changes when a firm adopts a modern news dissemination technology. We find that after continental European firms begin using an English-language electronic wire service to disseminate company news, they exhibit a stronger initial reaction to earnings surprises, a lower post earnings announcement stock price drift, and an increase in abnormal trading volume near earnings announcements, compared with when they disseminated their news in non-electronic format and in a continental European language. Our results hold for a sub-sample of firms for which the decision to use a wire service was likely exogenous. The effect of wire services on investor attention is due to the format of news (electronic and English-language), not to the increased speed of news transmission.