Philippine E-Journals

The Impact of Newspaper Reportage of Natural and Human Tragedies on the Performance of the Philippine Stock Market

Percival S. Gabriel

Discipline: Economics, Finance

 

Abstract:

This research aimed at finding out the effect of newspaper reports about the aftermath of the typhoon Ondoy and the Maguindanao Massacre from September 28 to December 29, 2009 on the performance of the Philippine Stock Market. These two successive events were plausible cases to compare as to the effect on the Philippine bourse since the Ondoy flood represented natural calamity and the Maguindanao Massacre exemplified man-made tragedy. The manner of reporting in the newspapers was measured through expressivity rating. This research also sought to find out if the randomness, as EMH or EMT predicts, applies to the overall performance of the Philippine bourse. In this regard, the Phisix was tested for randomness using autocorrelation. Likewise, autoregression was used for appropriate model on significant coefficients. Findings showed significant regression models between the expressivity rating of newspaper articles about the Ondoy aftermath, but no significant regression model was derived between the expressivity rating of articles about the Maguindanao Massacre and the Philippine Stock Market index. On the other hand, there were significantly high autocorrelation coefficients during the two newspaperarticle- events within the last quarter of 2009. Significant autoregression models were also derived incorporating the expressivity rating of opinion articles and the Forex.