A Face Can Launch a Thousand Shares—and an 0.80% Abnormal Return

In this paper we examine the market reaction—price and volume—to the appearance of a firm in the Who’s News column of The Wall Street Journal. We differentiate between those firms whose articles are accompanied by a picture of an executive and a control set of firms whose articles on the same day are not accompanied by a picture. The results show a more pronounced market reaction to the “cum picture” articles, consistent with the incomplete information theory of Merton [1987] and the heuristic-based familiarity hypothesis. There is no evidence of significant long-run abnormal performance for the sample firms