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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’.

We investigate the effect standard time series β‐adjustments have on the OLS‐β. We report that most changes are not statistically significant and the β‐adjustments appear to have no relationship to the extent of thin trading. Researchers using β face the difficult choice of using an estimate known to be biased by thin trading, or making an adjustment that may not be statistically significant.