Université publique ouverte sur le monde et ancrée dans le développement scientifique, culturel et économique de sa région, l'ULiège s'appuie sur ses trois piliers : l'enseignement, la recherche et l'engagement citoyen.
L'ULiège forme des citoyens responsables, dotés de connaissances de pointe et d'un esprit critique, capables de partager les savoirs et de faire progresser un monde de plus en plus complexe.
L’ouverture au monde est au cœur des priorités de l’Université de Liège. L’institution propose de nombreuses formules de mobilité internationale tant à ses étudiants qu’à ses chercheurs et son personnel, permettant ainsi à chacun de renforcer ses compétences transversales et sa connaissance des langues.
L'ULiège : une expérience à vivre au quotidien. Implantée dans 3 villes et 4 campus, l'université est un acteur incontournable en termes d'environnement et de mobilité.
Marie Lambert (Supervisor), HEC Liège, Management School of the University of Liège
Wouter Torsin (President), HEC Liège, Management School of the University of Liège
Gabriela Contreras, Radboud University
Theodoros Evgeniou, INSEAD
Ashwin Ittoo, HEC Liège, Management School of the University of Liège
Thomas Renault, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Summary
From major news outlets to social media and the general public, it is common to find mentions of the existence of relationships between narratives and economic outcomes. By definition, those narratives are forms of soft information, which until recently have been difficult to quantify and are often propagated through natural language and text in particular. With the advent of the digital age and the exponential increase of information available online in the past years, researchers can now leverage this soft information and bring much-needed academic rigor to understand the role narratives play in shaping specific economic outcomes.
This thesis seeks to leverage a key dimension of those narratives: Sentiment. In the context of this thesis, sentiment is defined as the disposition of an entity toward another entity, expressed via a specific medium. In the first three chapters of this thesis, the medium of interest is “News,” specifically news stories published in the financial press. The first paper uses firm-specific news sentiment to understand why market anomalies earn a premium on earnings announcement days, a finding which could previously not be reconciled with classical risk-based pricing frameworks. News sentiment shows that this premium for value firms is concentrated on bad news events, which permits us to propose new avenues to understand this market anomaly.
The second and third chapters investigate how news can help understand drivers of market anomalies. Market anomalies have played a central role in asset pricing research over the past decades, and numerous competing theories seek to accommodate empirical observations that deviate from the classical model. Chapter two proposes a framework based on cash-flow and discount rate news, allowing us to capture the driving forces behind anomaly returns and disentangle competing explanations for anomalies. Notably, we find that cash-flow news plays a fundamental role. It turns out that changes in expectations along anomaly characteristics comove as a function of aggregate cash-flow news. The third chapter investigates drivers of anomaly returns and characterizes news of momentum and value stocks, in particular, highlighting the strong negative correlation between the two. It is also the first to link cash-flow news, discount rate news, and news sentiment.
The economic outcome of interest in the fourth chapter is to understand how changes in company ownership, especially following leveraged buy-outs, affect employee welfare. To achieve this task, we gather millions of online reviews of employees about their employers and investigate the underlying text data to characterize the impact private equity firms have on those narratives. Overall, employees’ satisfaction drops sharper following leverage buy-outs than in other types of ownership changes. We can trace the problems back to employees who are lower in the corporate hierarchy: complaints about lack of care from management and fear of layoffs and cost-cutting drive the decline of employee sentiment.
Autres agendas
Agenda
Recherche
Ciné-débat "Après la pluie"
Un documentaire réalisé par Quentin Noirfalisse et Jérémy Parotte à la suite des inondations de juillet 2021, sur base des travaux coordonnés par Jacques Teller et Joël Privot (Faculté des Sciences appliquées de l'ULiège).
ULiège Hosting Offer & Masterclass for MSCA-2024-Postdoctoral Fellowship Applications
Registration latest by May 17, 2024
Online Masterclass organised by ULiege-RISE to support the proposal preparation for selected applicants who want to co-apply with ULiège supervisors to the MSCA-2024-Postdoctoral Fellowships.
18th Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium (BOSS XVIII)
The BOSS will cover a broad range of timely topics of modern organic synthesis, including asymmetric synthesis, chemical biology, electrosynthesis, medicinal chemistry, organocatalysis, organometallic chemistry and catalysis, … and many more!