Granger-caused by the increase in news in recent decades. The extent of pre-IPO media exposure is found to be positively related to IPO underpricing both in US (Reese 1998 and Ducharme, Rajgopal and Sefcik 2001a)and in other countries(Ho, Taher, Lee and Fargher 2001). The pre-IPO media hype is related to the IPO's short-term and long-term volume (Reese 1998)and to their post-offer return performances (Ducharme, Rajgopal and Sefcik 2001b). Initial return is shown to have a positive influence on the subsequent media coverage(Demers and Lewellen 2003), suggesting IPO underpricing publicizes stocks to investors who buy the stock in the after-market. Our paper differs from this literature in that we do not focus on what drives the media coverage of IPO firms. Nor do we focus on the pre-lPO stage or on the first day's return. Instead, we take the bubble period as given and follow IPOs over their rise and fall in the period 1996 through 2000. Second, unlike most of the above papers, we look at both the numbers of news items and their type(good, bad or neutral) from all media sources to capture the aggregate media effect IIL DAtA A. The IPO sample We start with a large sample of firms that went public between January 1996 and December 2000 After excluding unit offers. rights offers. closed-end mutual funds REITs and ADRs. our search of the Thomson Financial's SDC database yielded 2, 603 completed issues We identify and extract 461 internet companies from this sample using the reference list from Loughran and Ritter(2004 ). We cross-check our internet IPO issues with Loughran and Ritter(2002)and Ljungqvist and wilhelm(2003)to correct errors in the Sdc data. We remove one issue that went publ twice and was, therefore, counted twice during our sample period. That leaves us with 459 internet IPOs For the remaining 2, 142 issues in this SDC sample, we first manually check for misclassification, and exclude 9 issues which are in fact ADRs, I belonging to unit trusts, 2 misclassified as IPOs, 2 without filing, offer or trading price information in SEC, news sources and CRSP, and I foreign offer with a minor tranche in the US. Then we extract a matching set of non-internet iPos from the rest of the 2. 127 issues based on offer size and offer date as follows: for each of the internet IPOs, we impose a 20% band on its7 Granger-caused by the increase in news in recent decades. The extent of pre-IPO media exposure is found to be positively related to IPO underpricing both in US (Reese 1998 and Ducharme, Rajgopal and Sefcik 2001a) and in other countries (Ho, Taher, Lee and Fargher 2001). The pre-IPO media hype is related to the IPO’s short-term and long-term volume (Reese 1998) and to their post-offer return performances (Ducharme, Rajgopal and Sefcik 2001b). Initial return is shown to have a positive influence on the subsequent media coverage (Demers and Lewellen 2003), suggesting IPO underpricing publicizes stocks to investors who buy the stock in the after-market. Our paper differs from this literature in that we do not focus on what drives the media coverage of IPO firms. Nor do we focus on the pre-IPO stage or on the first day’s return. Instead, we take the bubble period as given and follow IPOs over their rise and fall in the period 1996 through 2000. Second, unlike most of the above papers, we look at both the numbers of news items and their type (good, bad or neutral) from all media sources to capture the aggregate media effect. III. DATA A. The IPO sample We start with a large sample of firms that went public between January 1996 and December 2000. After excluding unit offers, rights offers, closed-end mutual funds, REITs, and ADRs, our search of the Thomson Financial’s SDC database yielded 2,603 completed issues. We identify and extract 461 internet companies from this sample using the reference list from Loughran and Ritter (2004). We cross-check our internet IPO issues with Loughran and Ritter (2002) and Ljungqvist and Wilhelm (2003) to correct errors in the SDC data. We remove one issue that went public twice and was, therefore, counted twice during our sample period. That leaves us with 459 internet IPOs. For the remaining 2,142 issues in this SDC sample, we first manually check for misclassification, and exclude 9 issues which are in fact ADRs, 1 belonging to unit trusts, 2 misclassified as IPOs, 2 without filing, offer or trading price information in SEC, news sources and CRSP, and 1 foreign offer with a minor tranche in the US. Then, we extract a matching set of non-internet IPOs from the rest of the 2,127 issues based on offer size and offer date as follows: for each of the internet IPOs, we impose a 20% band on its