官员视察、媒体关注与政府补助——来自中国上市公司的经验证据

Official Inspection,Media Coverage and Government Subsidies:Empirical Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies

本文以2008-2011年沪深两市的上市公司为样本,实证研究了官员视察活动对企业获取政府补助的影响,并进一步考察了媒体报道对官员视察效应的调节作用。结果显示:(1)官员视察对企业获取政府补助具有显著的正向影响,这种影响因企业产权性质和视察官员级别存在差异;(2)考虑媒体的监督作用之后,本文发现,负面媒体报道会显著减少官员视察带来的政府补助,非负面媒体报道则无显著影响;(3)从政府补助的经济效果来看,政府补助对于企业业绩的提升作用因有无官员视察呈现差异,即对于受到官员视察的企业而言,政府补助的经济效果要弱得多。本文尝试从政府官员活动和外部治理机制的视角探讨政府补助现象,这有助于理解转型经济国家中政企关系扮演的角色和媒体在公共资源配置中的监督作用。

Recently economists have stressed the idea that good economic institutions, especially ment quality or the governance efficiency, are instrumental to economic growth, and the role played by increasingly attracts academic attention. During the rapid economic development, Chinese local officials important part in promoting economic system reform, investment attraction, private economy development structure construction and regional economic co-operation. the govern- the officials also play an , local infra- However, the existing literatures have focused the official activities on the firms＇ political connection, while in China, nothing is better than the most obvious and common official inspection to demonstrate the effect of politi- cians＇ activities on the company policy. Identifying all the listed firms news on their company websites, we find that the number of official inspection to 353 listed firms reach up to 818 in 2010. Actually, official inspection is not only an vital way to fulfill administrative duties and to investigate economic situation itself, but also means considerable politically and economically. Within the transforming system, Chinese government not merely gets hold of plentiful e- conomic resource, but also influences market resource allocation directly via macro-control and administrative inter- vention. So, being the possible way to build political connection for firms＇ rent-seeking, can official inspection bene- fit firms with more policy resource, such as government subsidies？ As the benchmark, the firms inspected are of so strong demonstration effect and attract the public attention so easily that the media motivated by the sensational effect will spend more effort packaging, discovering and publishing what they find about the firms. Then, will media coverage change the economic effect of official inspection on the firms？ Using the sample of companies listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges between 2008 and 2011, we empirically study the influence of official inspection on the companies＇ ability to obtain government subsidies, and further investigate the moderating role of media coverage. We find that ： （ 1 ） official inspection is positively related to firms＇ ability to get government subsidies and the conclusion differs between different firm ownerships and in- specting official levels. （2） Negative media coverage has a significant impact on the relationship between inspection and government subsidies while the nonnegative one has not. （3） Government subsidies can significantly boost firms＇ performance. However, the positive effect occurs in the firms without inspection only while the firms inspected suffer performance deterioration from subsidies. This paper attempts to explore the government subsidies from the perspective of Chinese official activities and the external disciplinary mechanisms, and helps to further understand the role of government-enterprise relationship in the transition economy and the effect of media in the field of public resource allocation. Compared to the previous research, this study contributes the literature in three ways： fundamentally, the re- search provides some new explanations for the official activities by investigating the relationship between official in- spection and government subsidies from the prospective of resource allocation. Moreover, in contrast to the using of managers＇ political experience or background to explore the effect of official activities on firms, results shows that official inspection can capture the essence of political relationship more obviously and appropriately, which may be an creative measure of political connection. Lastly, this paper also provides evidence that media coverage matters in promoting public resource allocation and the policy makers may take better measures about micro-economy with the help of press, which is consistent with the view that media coverage may be effective governance mechanism for pub- lic management.