What’s in a name? Evidence on corporate name changes from the Australian capital market

This paper investigates the economic impact of corporate name changes around the time of their announcement. We analyse a sample of 107 listed Australian companies that changed their name over the period January 1995 to December 1999. We conduct separate analysis of firms having ‘major’ versus ‘minor’ name changes; of firms with coincident financial restructuring versus firms without restructuring; of small firms versus large firms and of dotcom firms versus non-dotcom firms. Generally, we find some evidence of a negative association between the corporate name change event and abnormal returns. This seems particularly the case for those companies whose name change is deemed to be ‘major’.