Abstract: 

We use novel data covering 2 billion daily employee-article interactions across approximately 2 million firms to characterize firms’ exposures to uncertainty in almost real-time. We find that, in the cross-section, firms that more intensely read about financial versus other uncertainty-related topics are those most exposed to changes in aggregate measures of economic uncertainty. Consistent with exposure to uncertainty being priced, public firms that spend more time reading these topics have a 2% higher cost of capital, translating into relatively low investment rates. Higher attention to financial uncertainty relates to 7% lower investment and 5% lower hiring on an annual basis.