Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

PhD in Accountancy

Department

Department of Accountancy

First Advisor

Ari Yezegel

Second Advisor

Ronen Gal-Or

Third Advisor

Da Xu

Abstract

Financial social media platforms have emerged as an increasingly important source of information for investors, as illustrated by the role of Seeking Alpha, Reddit, X (Twitter), and other platforms in the 2021 “meme stock” episodes and the subsequent SEC report on equity market structure. While prior research has largely focused on the informativeness of social media content—asking whether social media sentiment predicts stock prices or trading activity—our understanding of how social media reshapes the broader capital market information environment remains limited. Using data collected from Seeking Alpha, a leading crowd-sourced financial research platform and one of the largest online investing communities, my dissertation supplements this literature from three perspectives. First, I examine how human editors on financial social media influence the capital market by selectively promoting certain articles, thereby directing investor attention and affecting price discovery and liquidity. Second, I study how the language style of content contributors—specifically, their use of self-inclusive language—shapes perceived credibility, article quality, and subsequent return patterns. Third, I investigate the implications of social media analysts’ coverage on firms’ financial reporting quality, particularly earnings management. I find that, different from sell-side analysts whose coverage is associated with decreased earnings management, coverage by social media analysts is associated with increased accrual and real earnings management. The first paper (coauthored with Ari Yezegel) examines the role of Seeking Alpha editors as gatekeepers by studying the platform’s “Editor’s Pick” designation. I show that editor-promoted articles elicit stronger return and trading volume reactions and are incorporated into prices more quickly than otherwise similar non-promoted articles, particularly in periods of high uncertainty and for firms with limited sell-side coverage. Editor promotion also reduces information asymmetry and improves liquidity, reallocates investor attention away from other articles, and induces authors to increase effort in their subsequent contributions. These findings highlight the economic importance of editorial decisions on financial social media, especially in information-poor environments. The second paper (sole-authored) examines how social media analysts’ language style affects investor reactions, focusing on their use of self-inclusive language (first-person pronouns such as “I” and “we”) in Seeking Alpha articles. Decomposing self-inclusive language into a routine component and an abnormal, potentially opportunistic component, I find that routine usage is associated with higher article quality and more favorable stock returns, consistent with credible engagement. In contrast, abnormal self-inclusive language is linked to lower-quality content and negative long-run price performance, even though such articles attract more and more favorable reader comments. The evidence suggests that some analysts strategically use self-inclusive language to bolster weak research, and that this behavior is dampened when reputation concerns are stronger or when information asymmetry is lower. My third paper (sole-authored) examines whether coverage by social media analysts (SMAs) affects firms’ financial reporting quality, focusing on earnings management. I find that increases in SMA attention are followed by higher levels of both accrual-based and real earnings management. These results are robust to multiple alternative specifications and measurement choices. In contrast to prior evidence that greater sell-side analyst coverage is associated with lower earnings management, the findings indicate that SMA coverage does not play a monitoring role comparable to traditional sell-side coverage.

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