Saxton, GregoryAhmed, Tahmina2024-07-182024-07-182024-03-012024-07-18https://hdl.handle.net/10315/42116Business entities face a multitude of external influences such as social, economic, and environmental factors. These outside forces have the capacity to instigate meaningful financial outcomes, emphasizing their importance for both the firms themselves and external stakeholders, namely, investors and regulatory authorities. In my dissertation, I explore two such outside yet discrete forces – social media engagement and city crime. Building on the concept of “online firestorms” that tweets can entice, I investigate a set of tweets sent by the S&P500 firms and their CEOs that the Twitterverse considers controversial. Consistent with social media’s cancel culture, I find evidence that the perceived controversial CEO tweets are associated with significant negative stock market reactions. The detrimental impact of CEOs’ controversial tweets is intensified for firms with “Star CEOs” and reversed for firms with high individual ownership. Using the same concept of “controversy” in firm tweets, I find contrasting outcomes that imply a positive significant reaction of controversial tweets on the stock market. This evidence complements inferences from previous studies that documented price-distortion behavior of social media messages firms post. Sentiment analyses of these firm-tweets reveal when the tweet contents are positively oriented, the market reacts more optimistically no matter the perceived controversy in the tweets. My dissertation expands the influence of outside forces by investigating crime rate in the city in which firms are headquartered. Using the Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases issued by the SEC to firms for fraudulent financial reporting and the city crime rates in the USA, I show evidence that indicates the higher the crime rate in the city in which firms are headquartered, the higher the likelihood of fraudulent reporting. Further, with subsample analysis, I demonstrate a nuanced influence of CEO compensation and of proximity to the SEC’s headquarter, on the relationship between crime and fraudulent financial reporting.Author owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.AccountingFinanceCommunicationElectronic Thesis or Dissertation2024-07-18Social mediaTwitterBig dataCEOCapital marketMarket efficiencyFinancial reportingReporting qualityAccounting fraudCity crime