The paper "The Causal Impact of Media in Financial Markets" by Joseph Engelberg and Christopher A. Parsons examines the causal relationship between media coverage and investor behavior in financial markets. The authors address the challenge of disentangling the impact of media reporting from the events being reported by comparing the behaviors of investors with access to different media coverage of the same information event. They use zip codes to identify 19 mutually exclusive trading regions, corresponding to 19 large U.S. cities and local newspapers. For earnings announcements of S&P 500 Index firms, they find that local media coverage strongly predicts local trading, after controlling for various factors such as earnings surprise, firm characteristics, and local investors' characteristics. The local trading-local coverage effect is precise and depends on the timing of local reporting, with the strongest effect observed one day after the earnings announcement. Additionally, the effect disappears during extreme weather events, which disrupt the transmission of media content to investors but do not affect the underlying information or investor demands. The study contributes to the literature on the media's influence on real outcomes and the high trading volume in financial markets.The paper "The Causal Impact of Media in Financial Markets" by Joseph Engelberg and Christopher A. Parsons examines the causal relationship between media coverage and investor behavior in financial markets. The authors address the challenge of disentangling the impact of media reporting from the events being reported by comparing the behaviors of investors with access to different media coverage of the same information event. They use zip codes to identify 19 mutually exclusive trading regions, corresponding to 19 large U.S. cities and local newspapers. For earnings announcements of S&P 500 Index firms, they find that local media coverage strongly predicts local trading, after controlling for various factors such as earnings surprise, firm characteristics, and local investors' characteristics. The local trading-local coverage effect is precise and depends on the timing of local reporting, with the strongest effect observed one day after the earnings announcement. Additionally, the effect disappears during extreme weather events, which disrupt the transmission of media content to investors but do not affect the underlying information or investor demands. The study contributes to the literature on the media's influence on real outcomes and the high trading volume in financial markets.