媒体关注能影响上市公司现金股利支付吗？[Can media attention affect corporate cash dividend policy?]

Over last ten years, the media has gradually been playing an irreplaceable role in economic society. As efficient means of improving insufficient judicial protection, media plays an important role in disseminating public information, restraining the government’s behavior, shaping corporate policy and relieving the market failure. In China, the media has reported a series of scandals such as “the Sanlu Poisonous milk powder incident” and the “Shuanghui cleanbuteral incident” caused by corporate illegal behavior, indicating that the media can effectively expose the corporate violations. For this reason, many researchers in China began to research the effect of the media attention on the function of corporate governance. The researchers find that media attention can effectively shape firms’ information environment, improve managers’ behavior and promote Chinese listed enterprises to fulfill their social responsibilities. Moreover, extensive media coverage will increase the auditors’ concerns about the audit failure and lower their level of tolerance in audit risks, resulting in an increase of the audit fees. In a word, all these studies have shown that the media make significant contributions to improving corporate governance. However, there are few studies regarding the relation between media attention and cash dividend policy. It still remains unclear that whether media as an important information intermediary can influence firms’ dividend policy. Therefore, this paper investigates the association between the media attention and the cash dividend policy of Chinese listed firms from 2003- 2012 by using Logit model and Tobit model. The author also uses an instrumental approach and an exogenous shock as well to deal with the endogenous problem, In addition, the paper uses OLS regression to verify the relation between the media attention and the market reaction to the cash dividend announcement of the Chinese listed firms. Results from the empirical tests in this paper suggest that: (1) Media attention can significantly improve the firms’ propensity to pay cash dividend; (2) Media attention can significantly enhance the market reaction to cash dividend payment. The findings suggest that the media helps protect shareholders’ interests and reduce the information problem around dividend announcement. Innovation of this paper is mainly as follows: (1) Though a large number of studies have discussed factors contributing to cash dividend policy, few of them have studied whether the media could have an effect on making cash dividend decisions. As a result, this paper provides new evidence on the related study of dividend theories; (2) Foreign researchers find that cash dividend announcement can bring significant abnormal stock returns. However, most studies have shown that this is not obvious in Chinese capital market. The reason why the results of the Chinese studies in this field are not consistent with those of related foreign studies still needs further research. A possible explanation could be that the samples used in the previous Chinese research were not divided into groups according to firms’ different characteristics, which made the significance of the regression for the whole samples smoothed away. Therefore in this paper, the author investigates how market reactions differently to cash dividend announcements of firms with different levels of media coverage ; (3) In order to address the concern caused by endogeneity , the paper uses an instrumental variable and a natural environment ,which is rarely mentioned in past research concerned with media attention.