Air Pollution and Media Slant: Evidence from Chinese Corporate News

This paper examines the impact of air pollution on the media slant of publicly listed firms in China. Using a large panel of air quality and media data at the city level, we find that lower air quality generally leads to a more negative media slant. When the air quality falls from lightly polluted t...

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Published inEmerging markets finance & trade Vol. 58; no. 10; pp. 2880 - 2894
Main Authors Wang, Xinjie, Wu, Ge, Xiang, Zhiqiang, Zhang, Jianyu
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 09.08.2022
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Air pollution
China
media slant
China
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Summary:This paper examines the impact of air pollution on the media slant of publicly listed firms in China. Using a large panel of air quality and media data at the city level, we find that lower air quality generally leads to a more negative media slant. When the air quality falls from lightly polluted to heavily polluted, the number of negative sentences in a news article increases by about 1%. Our subsample analysis shows that the effect of air pollution on media slant is similar for news articles covering large and small firms, SOE and non-SOE firms and for official and non-official newspaper articles. Furthermore, the effect of air pollution on media slant is stronger for firms in heavy polluting industries. These results suggest that air pollution affects media slant.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:1540-496X
1558-0938
DOI:10.1080/1540496X.2021.2013196