Research On The Influence Of Media Attention On Enterprises’ Information Disclosure Behavior

There exist many problems on the Growth Enterprises Market（GEM）of China atpresent. Thus corporate governance should be strengthened in order to find essentialsolutions. Information disclosure by GEM listed companies is an important method toalleviate information asymmetry and to protect the interests of the investors. Since thelegal system still need to be better improved, as “the fourth power” in corporategovernance, the media is being paid to greater attention than ever before. Will it take activeeffect on corporate governance? Can it impact the behavior of information disclosure oflisted companies on GEM? On the above basis, considering China as a transition economy,the legal environment is not so perfect. Moreover, the government still plays a prominentrole in social economic life. Under the background of the specific condition, will the powerof media attention differs? Which kind of the external macro environment can be morehelpful for the media to execute its supervisory power? This paper takes the research on theabove questions.First of all, this paper selects the outcome of annual appraisal of GEM listedenterprises’ information disclosure by Shenzhen stock exchange from2010to2012andrelated governance and financial data. Then this paper explores the relationship betweenmedia attention and information disclosure behavior. Based on the above analysis, thispaper joins the macro-environmental variables such as “legal environment” and“government intervention” into research model. The result shows that although there ispositive correlated relationship between media attention and the improvement of theinformation disclosure quality of the GEM listed companies, only the negative reports ofthe media have significant effect. By expanding the study, it also finds out that healthylegal environment is a vital external factor to influence the power of media attention. But the effect of government intervention is not significant.Compared with the existing literatures, this paper proves that the power of the media’snegative reports is constructive for the improvement of GEM listed companies’information disclosure quality, which provides a better understanding of the role of themedia in corporate governance. In addition, this paper shows that the legal environment isan important external factor to the media supervision.