The Effect Of Media Coverage On Firm Performance

Nowadays,with the information disseminated rapidly,the media is playing an increasingly important role in people's daily lives through the Internet.As there are lots of stakeholders involved in the corporate,the media coverage of corporate has become one of the most important aspects of people's concern.With its unique social influence and reliability,the media can play a significant role in agenda-setting through the way of releasing news about enterprises,which has also attracted wide attention among scholars.In the existing literatures,the relationship between media attention and corporate social responsibility disclosure as well as the reputation mechanism of negative media coverage has been studied a lot.While,there is little research on the influence of media coverage tone on firm performance.It also remains unknown whether the relationship between media coverage and firm performance will be moderated by the disclosure of corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation.Therefore,this paper attempts to explore how the different tones of media coverage influence firm performance.In addition,this paper introduces internal and external factors to be moderating variables.Specifically,the advance reputation of corporate as the result of evaluation of the external stakeholders is treated as an external factor and corporate social responsibility disclosure is treated as an internal factor to explore their impacts on the relationship between media coverage and firm performance.Based on the above problems,A-share listed manufacturing companies of 2013-2017 Rankins CSR Rating(RKS)reports are selected as the research subjects,and a total of 1404 observations are obtained from these 359 listed companies.Based on the Stakeholder Theory,Information Asymmetry Theory,Agenda-setting Theory and Attribution Theory,this paper explores the impact of media coverage on firm performance and introduces corporate reputation and corporate social responsibility disclosure as moderating variables in the research models.The results show that negative media reports have a negative impact on firm performance,while positive media reports have a positive impact on firm performance.Besides,we found that negative media reports have a greater impact on firm performance.In addition,the corporate reputation and corporate social responsibility disclosure can negatively moderate the relationship between negative media reports and firm performance.Through the endogeny test and robustness tests like replacing variables and reselecting sample,the above conclusions are still valid.Finally,according to the theoretical analysis and empirical results of this paper,relevant advices are put forward:(1)the media should adhere to the authenticity of the news,and actively excavate and report enterprise-related information to perform the functions of market supervision and agenda-setting well;(2)the governments should improve the laws to create a favorable environment for the media,and formulate disclosure standards of corporate social responsibility;(3)the enterprises should pay attention to the communication with stakeholders,and establish the reputation management mechanism.At the same time,they should improve the consciousness of disclosing social responsibility information to create a stable external environment for themselves.