Influence of Media Attention on Investors'Heterogeneous Beliefs:A Case Study of China's Stock Market

With the rapid development of Internet media,Internet media coverage has more or less influence on investors'psychological level.This article uses Python technology to climb 2019.9 to 2020.1 of the monthly news reports on A share listed companies in the Snowball net,and studies the relationship between media attention and investors'heterogeneous beliefs.It is found that media attention is positively correlated with investors'heterogeneous beliefs,that is,investors are more likely to choose stocks frequently reported by media.Further research finds that media reports will strengthen investors'heterogeneous beliefs,affect investors'investment behavior,and ultimately lead to the increase of stock trading volume.

Generating timeline summaries with social media attention

Timeline generation is an important research task which can help users to have a quick understanding of the overall evolution of one given topic. Previous methods simply split the time span into fixed, equal time intervals without studying the role of the evolutionary patterns of the underlying topic in timeline generation. In addition, few of these methods take users＇ collective interests into considerations to generate timelines. We consider utilizing social media attention to address these two problems due to the facts： 1） social media is an important pool of real users＇ collective interests; 2） the information cascades generated in it might be good indicators for boundaries of topic phases. Employing Twitter as a basis, we propose to incorporate topic phases and user＇s collective interests which are learnt from social media into a unified timeline generation algorithm. We construct both one informativeness-oriented and three interestingness-oriented evaluation sets over five topics. We demonstrate that it is very effective to generate both informative and interesting timelines. In addition, our idea naturally leads to a novel presen- tation of timelines, i.e., phase based timelines, which can potentially improve user experience.

Role of Media Coverage in Keeping Lid on Government Expenses

Information monopoly of bureaucrats helps them maximize discretionary budget. Public disclosure of budget can alleviate information asymmetry between government and the public and empower public supervision on government budget. With information intermediary function and reputational governance function, the media exert a budget intervention effect in the public disclosure of government budget, which further increases the effect of government budget disclosure. This paper investigates how media reports influence "three public expenses"(TPE) budget planning of central government departments by examining media reports on the disclosure of budget and final accounts and using TPE budget as a proxy variable for discretionary budget of bureaucrats. We have reached the following findings:(1) The higher the TPE budget implementation rate, the greater budget growth will be. But this correlation can be restrained by media attention;(2) Different stance of the media may exert different governance effects on TPE budget. Good news about TPE may motivate bureaucrats to restrain the positive impact of TPE budget implementation on budget growth. However, bad news about TPE will exert its budget intervention effect only when administrative governance mechanism intervenes. This study has broadened research on the media's governance effect from the perspective of government budget transparency and verified that under China's unique institutional background, the media may still play a positive role in public sector governance.

How Does ESG Performance Impact Corporate Financing Costs?An Empirical Study in China

In the background of the green transformation of the economy and society,the ESG performance of enterprises has been paid more and more attention in the investment decision-making.However,previous studies have inadequately explored how the ESG performance affects corporate financing costs.Based on the information asymmetry theory,this paper analyzes the impact mechanism of ESG performance on corporate financing costs.Then,taking 1044 A-share listed companies in2016–2020 as a sample,through the sorting and analysis of ESG report disclosure and rating data,the company’s ESG performance indicators are obtained,and an empirical model is built to test the relationship between ESG performance and corporate financing costs.This paper constructs a panel regression model using ESG rating data and corporate financial data and finds that in the overall sample,the higher the ESG performance,the lower the equity financing cost;The higher the ESG performance,the lower the debt financing cost.In addition,it also discussed the moderating effect of enterprise scale and media attention on the impact of ESG performance on enterprise financing costs.The empirical results show that the influence of company size on ESG performance on financing costs has a moderating effect and a positive moderating effect.