We spent years collecting news on murdered environmentalists across the globe.

AND coding the multinationals whose projects were involved in these assassinations.

Our new study w/ @DKreitmeir & @PaulRaschky explores how markets respond to high-profile human rights abuse. 1/N

... More specifically, what happens to the stock prices of multinationals connected to violence through the HR spotlight?

Working paper: "The Value of Names-Civil Society, Information, and Governing Multinationals on the Global Periphery" SocXiv URL: https://bit.ly/3haUvMe 

2/N

Our main question:

How/can global civil society hold global companies accountable in the absence of reliable legal institutions & global authority? What’s the impact on named corporations? … And the limits of the strategy?

3/N

We use an Event Study Methodology (the original event study, not DID) to examine the abnormal returns around the highly public assassination of mining activists, before and after the publicised events occur.

These events are actually part of a nasty global trend... 4/N

... one that is at the centre of public human rights campaigns by the media and transnational civil society.

Thus, we wondered, what is the power of these stories and do they do damage to the publicly-traded companies *named* in coverage of these events?

5/N

What do we find?

It's actually terrible to be publicly connected to the assassination of activists. We find significant negative cumulative abnormal returns for mining corps "associated" with violence in the media.

The pattern is robust.

Human rights press has bite ... 6/N

... That is for mining companies who appear in human rights publicity, 10 days following an assassination their loss in market cap. is around 100 million USD

Forgive our heterodox abbreviation.

7/N

Our reading of this is that transnational civil society--specifically, human rights--and their role of publicising these abuses has material consequences.

Even where the likelihood of being formally held accountable for malfeasance is very small.

8/N

We find that media pressure is particularly important!

We do so by comparing the "hit" companies take during heavy news cycles, versus for calmer news cycles (ala David Stromberg's famous @SU_Economics news pressure measure).

The hit is attenuated for busy news days...

9/N

Our data draws from the scouring of human rights news coverage of assassinations: 20 years of stories across over 120 countries.

This was made possible through the masterful research assistant help of @RRMaximiliano & @LucyXIV. They had an insane task...

10/N

The Philippines and Peru are of course big culprits in this trend.

This paper was partially inspired by talking to traders when I lived in the Philippines. And observing the relatively frequent killing of activists, journalists, and indigenous leaders.

11/N

For us, though, it is a bit odd. We had a cynical worry: we expected that the removal of activists would be lucrative.

The fact that the asset prices of companies associated to killings dive, made as curious about what is happening...

12/N

Our guess is that on average, there is a tension between the extent to which multinationals may be able to control misbehaviour locally. Either through the collusion of local officials and those involved in local projects. This is currently speculation of course... 13/N

What we do observe is this:

1) There is definitely a significant relationship between a) the extent to which domestic companies rely fiscally on natural resource revenue and b) the likelihood of violence. ....

14/N

2) We find no evidence that insiders are trading on prior knowledge of as assassinations authorisations. E.g. We don't observe movements showing markets are incorporating prior knowledge...

An analysis stolen shamelessly from @arindube, @KaplanEthan & @snaidunl QJE paper! 15/N

Thus, we do find human rights publicity is impactful, and impacts the bottom line of multinationals tied to these events (at least in short run). BUT Local political economy and organisational structures of ownership may mean these events persist.

Whew 16/16(+?)