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Using a comprehensive sample of 2,361 public U.S. corporate defendants and 715 public foreign corporate defendants in U.S. federal courts in the period 1995-2000, we find that the market reaction at the announcement of a U.S. federal lawsuit is less negative for U.S. corporate defendants. We find that this market reaction is rational; U.S. firms are less likely to lose than foreign firms controlling for year, industry, type of litigation, size and profitability. This may still reflect a sample selection bias. We control for this bias, and the results remain. We thus cannot rule out that U.S.firms have a home court advantage in U.S. federal courts.

We read all news items that came out between 1996 and 2000 on 458 Internet initial public offerings (IPOs) and a matching sample of 458 non-Internet IPOs (a total of 171,488 news items) and classify each news item as good news, neutral news, or bad news. We first document that the media were more positive for Internet IPOs in the period of the dramatic rise in share prices and more negative for Internet IPOs in the period of the dramatic fall in share prices. We then document that media hype is unable to explain the Internet bubble: A 1,646% difference exists in returns between Internet stocks and non-Internet stocks from January 1, 1997, through March 24, 2000 (the market peak), and the media can explain only 2.9% of that.

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