Foreign media slant, foreign investors, and informativeness of earnings

Albert Tsang (), Kun Tracy Wang () and Nathan Zhenghang Zhu ()
Additional contact information
Albert Tsang: Southern University of Science and Technology
Kun Tracy Wang: Australian National University
Nathan Zhenghang Zhu: Zhejiang University

Review of Accounting Studies, 2025, vol. 30, issue 1, No 3, 79-118

Abstract: Abstract Although foreign media outlets comprise a substantial proportion of the media covering U.S. financial markets, their characteristics and role in these financial markets have not been explored. Using a novel, manually collected dataset covering 1,126 media outlets from 48 countries, we explore whether there are systematic differences in the reporting properties of foreign and domestic media when they cover U.S. firm earnings announcements. We find that the coverage of foreign media outlets tends to exhibit a more negative slant than does the coverage of domestic media outlets. We further find that the negative slant of foreign media coverage is more pronounced for media outlets from countries that are less economically, politically, and culturally proximate to the United States. We also document that a greater amount of foreign media coverage amplifies the stock market’s reaction to earnings news, increases abnormal trading volume, and reduces information asymmetry between firms and investors. We find these effects to be stronger for firms with greater foreign ownership. Further analyses show that foreign media coverage plays a more significant role than domestic coverage in facilitating the incorporation of future earnings news into current stock prices.

Keywords: Foreign media; Media slant; Earnings announcements; Foreign institutional investors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G14 L82 M (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11142-023-09813-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:reaccs:v:30:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s11142-023-09813-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/accounting/journal/11142

DOI: 10.1007/s11142-023-09813-5

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Accounting Studies is currently edited by Paul Fischer

More articles in Review of Accounting Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().