Does the stock prices of oil companies affected by the announcement of a corporate name changes? This paper investigates the North American oil firms undergo name changes from 2000 to 2005. We report a significantly positive abcdrmal return (12.5%) and abcdrmal trading volume on the event day for the overall 125 companies in our sample. During the period of crude oil price surges after 2004, we find a tendency of increasing number of firms add oil to their corporate names to signal their links with the oil markets. In the U.S., the CARs of firms add oil in their corporate names show positive effects on their stock prices. Their pre-event excess returns are not offset by post-event drift, especially in the oil hot period. Interestingly, we find that firms delete oil names in the oil hot period suffer a significant negative CAR in the post-event period. We provide evidence that major name changes are more beneficial than minor name changes in the North America oil companies, and name changes affect stock prices more positively for smaller companies than for big firms on event day. Between the U.S. and Canada, we show that there are the different CAR trends for each country. The information leakage period is longer in Canada than the U.S. It is seen that a firm with a resource unrelated activities adds an oil name, it would earn a permanent CAR.
The overall results in our study suggest that the announcement of corporate name changes of oil companies convey important information to the stock market regarding their corporate images and identifies. Investors appear to respond enthusiastically to the word “oil” in corporate names because of the relationship with a glamorously lucrative and potentially growing oil prices.

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