Media Attention, Corporate Social Responsibility Performance And Analyst Prediction Accuracy

Capital market is driven by information.As the information intermediary in the capital market,securities analysts play a bridge role between companies and investors.They are occupied in digging,gathering,analyzing and interpreting information,forecasting the enterprises’ earnings,and conveying these earnings forecasts information to the investors in the form of publishing research reports,which to some extent can contribute to improve the efficiency of the capital market.The earnings forecasts information which comes from securities analysts is an important reference for many investors when they are making investment decisions,because the information can reduce the degree of information asymmetry between enterprises and investors.In highly informationalized nowadays society,with the continuous enhancement of corporate social responsibility consciousness in enterprises and the public,the role of media supervision to enterprises in capital market is increasing prominent.The behavior of the corporate social responsibility performing is able to guarantee the reliability of financial information and provide some other non-financial information.All the movements of the enterprises can be exposed to the public through media’s news reports,including the corporate social responsibility information,and the media is the most convenient channel for most investors and securities analysts to obtain information about the enterprises.As a result,the influence of media attention and the extent of corporate social responsibility performing to the accuracy of securities analysts’ earnings forecasts have received scholars’ attention.Based on the relevant literatures of the relations among media attention,the extent of corporate social responsibility performing and the accuracy of securities analysts’ earnings forecasts,combining with the theory of information asymmetry,the theory of stakeholder and so on,this article defined and described these three conceptions.Then this paper selected the A-share listing corporation from the Stock Exchange of Shanghai in the period of 2013-2015 as the research sample,examined the influence of media attention and the extent of corporate social responsibility performing to the accuracy of securities analysts’ earnings forecasts,and established an intermediate function test model to examine the mediator role of media attention in the relationship between the extent of corporate social responsibility performing and the accuracy of securities analysts’ earnings forecasts.The research results show that media attention and the extent of corporate social responsibility performing have a significant positive effect on the accuracy of securities analysts’ earnings forecasts.Meanwhile media attention has a significant positive effect on the extent of corporate social responsibility performing.And through further study,the result shows that media attention plays a partial mediator role between the extent of corporate social responsibility performing and the accuracy of securities analysts’ earnings forecasts.This article not only broadens the research scope about the factors that affect the accuracy of securities analysts’ earnings forecast,but also improves our understanding of the role of media in the capital market,and according to the research conclusion of this study,we make recommendations about how to improve the accuracy of securities analysts’ earnings forecast from these three angles: media,enterprises and securities analysts.