Political Bias in Corporate News: The Role of Conglomeration Reform in China
Joseph D. Piotroski,
T. J. Wong and
Tianyu Zhang
Journal of Law and Economics, 2017, vol. 60, issue 1, 173 - 207
Abstract:
Using textual analyses of 1.77 million articles, we find that, through the Chinese government's conglomeration reform that reorganizes official and nonofficial newspapers from the same locale into a news group under state control, there is an increase (decrease) in positive tone and political content in official (nonofficial) newspaper articles. The evidence is consistent with official newspapers becoming more concentrated on political goals and nonofficial newspapers becoming more focused on commercial objectives, thus better enabling the newspaper industry to pursue a dual role as the government's mouthpiece and an information institution supporting the market economy. Our results are robust to using a matched firm-month research design that examines the content of articles written about the same firm in the same month, a matched firm-event approach that examines concurrent newspaper articles published immediately following corporate earnings announcements, and a difference-in-differences approach to test for conglomeration effects.
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)
Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/693096 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/693096 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
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:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/693096
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Journal of Law and Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().