Stock market reactions to social media: Evidence from WeChat recommendations

This paper examines the market behavior of stocks that are favorably mentioned on official WeChat account (OWA). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate market reactions to recommendations on WeChat. The empirical results show that there is a significantly positive abnormal return and excess trading volume on the publication day. Moreover, the cumulative average abnormal return for OWA completely reverses in a short time, which supports the price pressure hypothesis. Additional analyses reveal that market reactions in the smaller firms are significantly greater than those in the largest firms on the publication day. Finally, we preclude possibilities that market reactions on the event day are induced by the secondary dissemination of analyst recommendations, firm-specific news releases, media coverage, and previous positive significant abnormal returns. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V.