This paper investigates whether firms that communicate information on social media have a lower cost of equity capital. Using a hand-collected dataset comprising the full universe of all firms listed on the NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ since the inception of Twitter, I show that firms that use Twitter have a lower cost of equity capital. Furthermore, firms that face the greatest information asymmetries; namely, smaller companies, companies with few analyst followings, and companies with the least institutional holdings, benefit particularly from tweeting financial information. For identification, I employ a difference-in-difference analysis based on the staggered adoption of Twitter, and a propensity score match (PSM) of tweeting and non-tweeting firms.

本文研究了在社交媒体上进行信息交流的公司股权资本成本是否较低。自Twitter成立以来，我们使用了一个手工收集的数据集，该数据集包含了NYSE，AMEX和NASDAQ上列出的所有公司的全部业务范围，我发现使用Twitter的公司的股本成本较低。此外，面对最大信息不对称的公司；即，较小的公司，很少有分析师追随的公司以及机构持股最少的公司尤其受益于发布财务信息。为了进行识别，我根据Twitter的采用情况以及发推和非发推公司的倾向得分匹配（PSM）进行了差异分析。