Séminaire de recherche Tianyu Zhang

Accounting and Management Control

Speaker: 

HEC Campus - Build.T - Room 004

Abstract: 

This paper examines whether social media delineate the bias of state-controlled traditional media by supplying less optimistically biased information to the market. Using a comprehensive sample of corporate news articles of Chinese newspapers and posts of an online stock forum, East Guba, from 2009 to 2016, we find that East Guba’s tone is less positively associated with that of the newspapers for the same firm on the same day when the newspapers are expected to be more optimistically biased. This decline in association in tone is significantly larger since the 2015 political shock which suppressed the reporting of negative corporate news by traditional media.

Finally, when the tone of the newspapers deviates positively from that of East Guba, the newspaper articles are perceived by the market to be less credible as reflected in their significantly attenuated stock return response.