Abstract:
We introduce Wiki-Peers, a dynamic measure of global firm connections based on hyperlinks between firms' Wikipedia pages. Our network covers roughly 80% of global equity market capitalization across 68 countries. Wiki-Peers is constructed from complete page revision histories without look-ahead bias and available in real time. Wikipedia links identify economically meaningful peers and help study how information shocks propagate across markets. We demonstrate the measure's usefulness in predicting international trade, stock return co-movement, and stock returns of global peer firms.
