As summarized in Table 1, the sample includes 20 different companies who
experienced an accident, scandal, product safety/health incident, or employeecentered crisis between 2000 and 2006.
Examples of the cases in the data set include the Alaska Airlines crash of
2000, the Tyco financial fraud of 2002, and the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
gender discrimination lawsuit filed in 2001. For two incidents in our sample,
the firms were often paired together in the press because of the nature of the
crisis—Martha Stewart and ImClone (insider trading) and Ford and Firestone
(tire explosions on Ford Explorer sports utility vehicles). In addition, because
of its size, Wal-Mart is in our sample twice—for its handling of Hurricane
Katrina and a gender discrimination lawsuit.