News Coverage Premium: A Tale of Two Papers

This study attempts to reconcile two papers that provide contradictory findings on the cross-sectional relation between news coverage and expected stock returns. I first identify elements of their research designs that may be responsible for their discrepancies and then directly examine the existence of news coverage premium using Ravenpack data. I find that stocks with little news coverage earn higher returns than stocks with high news coverage even after controlling for well-known risk factors, but stocks with zero news coverage do not seem to outperform stocks with high news coverage. My findings suggest that the news coverage premium may be sensitive to the time period of the analyses as well as the presence of market crashes.