Corporate News Disclosure and Competitive Advantage: What Factors Influence on S&P 500 Companies’ Competitive Advantage During 2022 Economic Crisis?

Abstract

This paper aims to explore corporate news related to the topic of the competitive advantage of S&P 500 companies in the period of the economic crisis in 2022. The observed companies are the biggest US companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The computerized qualitative analyses were done on 200 corporate news from January 2022 until November 2022, with 13,361 pages and 5,294,836 words. The research results prove that the US biggest companies disclosure intensively in public about their competitive advantage with 90.29% including text samples from initial corpus text. The companies disclosure about 4 main topics (factors) during this year’s crisis: (1) profitability; (2) financial market performance; (3) products and services; (4) top management leadership. The research article contributes to the current literature on competitive advantage narratives, how the biggest companies tend to achieve competitive advantage during the economic crisis and address messages to their stakeholders. These messages could be of the highest importance mostly because of existing uncertainties and high levels of risks.