The rise and fall of K-Fashion business: exploring the impact of corporate failure news on stock market indices

Abstract Global demand for K-Fashion has paralleled the rise and fall of numerous South Korean firms. Drawing on the corporate life cycle and news priming theories, this study explores how online news on insolvent K-Fashion firms shapes the stock market’s business cycle. In Study 1, we conducted dynamic topic modeling to analyze 35,960 news articles from 2010 to 2022. The findings revealed three categories of chronological topic changes, including sales performance improvement strategies, organizational restructuring, and the impact of global fashion labels. In Study 2, we employed multiple regression analysis to measure how insolvent K-Fashion firms’ news and macroeconomic factors affect the clothing firms in the Korea Composite Stock Price Index. The results demonstrated that equity disclosure, bankruptcy, Samsung C&T’s governance changes, and business diversification significantly influenced the stock market index. Integrating both natural language processing and structured data in this study offers practical insights to fashion firms and stock market investors.