Alper Darendeli

Although a rich academic literature examines the use of fake news by foreign actors for political manipulation, there is limited research on potential foreign intervention in capital markets. To address this gap, we construct a comprehensive database of (negative) fake news regarding U.S. firms by scraping prominent fact-checking sites. We identify the accounts that spread the news on Twitter (now X) and use machine-learning techniques to infer the geographic locations of these fake news spreaders. Our analysis reveals that corporate fake news is more likely than corporate non-fake news to be spread by foreign accounts. At the country level, corporate fake news is more likely to originate from African and Middle Eastern countries and tends to increase during periods of high geopolitical tension. At the firm level, firms operating in uncertain information environments and strategic industries are more likely to be targeted by foreign accounts. Overall, our findings provide initial evidence of foreign-originating misinformation in capital markets and thus have important policy implications.

We study the link between a previously neglected form of intangible firm asset—country reputation—and corporate sales. By exploiting variation in nationalities of foreign victims in local terror attacks, we detect unanticipated distortions in reputations of local countries in foreign countries and we pin down reductions in sales of local country firms in foreign markets. The reductions in sales are economically and statistically significant, persistent, and more pronounced after attacks with high levels of foreign media coverage. Local country firms, whose names resemble names from their countries of origin, experience greater deteriorations in their sales. The distortions in country reputations are associated with depreciations in overall firm value, sales growth, and profitability. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance. Funding: M. I. Canayaz thanks Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation for financial support. This work was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education [Academic Research FundTier 1, RG170/18]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4753 .

This magazine features our timely research on sustainability, emerging technologies, COVID-19 resilience, and emerging markets. From the research output of the Nanyang Business School’s faculty, PhD students and research fellows, their work spans the different aspects of business, from finance and accounting to marketing, operations, legal, management, and international business. The findings from their research hold significant practical implications for society as they increase our understanding of the emerging phenomenon and provide cues on how to promote desired behaviours and outcomes.

The mere marketing of firms as environmentally friendly does not mean that the firms are genuinely green. In this paper, we propose a new measure,Green Score, to capture firms’ investment in green human capital based on the concentration of green skills required in firms’ job postings. First, we find that firms that increase theirGreen Scorehave higher future profitability. Second, firms that increase theirGreen Scoregenerate more green patents, and those green patents are of higher quality and receive more citations. Third, traditional ratings widely used to evaluate firms’ environmental efforts do not consider firms’Green Score. Overall, our new action-based measure is simpler and less subjective and it offers a larger time-series variation than traditional disclosure-based environmental ratings.

By exploiting variation in nationalities of foreign victims in local terror attacks, we identify distortionary effects of terrorism on country image, trade relations and corporate sales to foreign countries. Effects of terrorism are economically and statistically significant, persistent, and more pronounced after attacks with casualties and high levels of foreign media coverage. “Guilty-by-association” firms, i.e., local country firms whose names resemble names from their countries of origin, are particularly affected through greater deteriorations in foreign segment sales. Distortions driven by terrorist activities also influence overall firm value, asset growth, and profitability.