BizEd

JulyAugust2013

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research Small IT Firms Enjoy Tweet Success A WORKING PAPER suggests that companies that RESEARCH RECOGNITIONS Raghuram G. Rajan, the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, is the recipient of the Burton Foundation's annual Regulatory Innovation Award. The global law firm Morrison & Foerster established the award in 2008 through the Burton Foundation to honor an academic or 50 July/August 2013 BizEd non-elected public official who has contributed to regulatory reform in the areas of corporate governance, securities, capital markets, or financial institutions. Feng Zhu, assistant professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business in Gregory Miller, Elizabeth Blankespoor, and Hal White tions. They also found that Twitter's effect is lower for larger companies that already enjoy high visibility. In the past, companies often assumed that standard practices of information disclosure were enough, relying on the press to get the word out about their latest information. But the press tends to cover only high-visibility companies, leaving smaller companies unheard. Now that firms have more direct and open channels such as Twitter for communicating with investors, the authors write, they can "reduce information asymmetry" in the market. "The Role of Dissemination in Market Liquidity: Evidence from Firms' Use of Twitter" is a working paper available online at ssrn.com/abstract=1657169. The paper is being considered for publication in the January 2014 issue of The Accounting Review. Los Angeles, has received the Western Academy of Management's Ascendant Scholar Award. The award recognizes individuals who completed their doctorate programs within the last seven years and have demonstrated achievements in research and teaching. He was recognized for his research on technology strategy and business model competition in platform-based markets and his teaching in strategic management. David Teece of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, has received the Royal Honour of Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He received the honor for his services to promote relations between New Zealand and the United States through his cofounding of the nonprofit Kea Global Network. The United States Association for Small Business and ISTOCKPHOTO/TH I N KSTOCK communicate with investors through Twitter enjoy measurable increases in liquidity and stock price as a result. The study was conducted by associate accounting professor Elizabeth Blankespoor of the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California and accounting professors Gregory Miller and Hal White of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor. The researchers collected data about a sample of information technology firms using Twitter from mid- to late 2009. To overcome the challenge of extracting data from Twitter's unique platform, they used a combination of computer programs to search for appropriate feeds and assigned assistants to collect data by hand. The trio found that Twitter use was "associated with lower bid-ask spreads, greater depths, and higher liquidity ratios," after they controlled for factors such as general news coverage and overall market condi-

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