Media Attention And Information Disclosure Quality

As an indispensable part of social organizations,charitable foundations fit in with the purpose and function of China's social policy reform under the current background.Public welfare undertakings help to alleviate social contradictions and promote the establishment of a harmonious society.However,charity scandals were frequently exposed in the past few years of China,which had brought great negative impact on the development of public welfare undertakings.How to improve the transparency and enhance the credibility of charitable organizations has become a hot social issues.In 2011,the ministry of civil affairs issued the guidelines for the development of charity undertakings in China(2011-2015),which pointed out that it is necessary to strengthen the supervision of government departments and the public on the disclosure of financial statements and improve the quality of information disclosure of charitable foundations.Drawing on foreign research on charitable foundations,This paper systematically studies the influence of negative media reports on charitable foundations under the special institutional background in China,in order to provide some empirical evidence for the restoration of credibility of charitable foundations and the improvement of donation level in China.Taking 100 foundations with media attention as research samples,this paper collected 600 datas of 100 foundations from 2009 to 2016 to empirically test the influence of negative media reports on the quality of charitable foundation information disclosure.The results are as follows:(1)The negative media reports on the foundations can contribute to the ascension of foundation information disclosure quality,effectively playing the role of external governance effect.In addition,the internal characteristics of the foundation,such as size,areas of concern,attribute and management expense ratio are significantly related to the quality of information disclosure of the foundation.(2)The intervention of high quality auditing can enhance the relation between negative media reports and the quality of foundation information disclosure.So social auditing combining with media attention on charity foundation play the role of the external supervision effectively.(3)The foundation information disclosure quality is closely related to donation income.High-quality information disclosure can attract more potential donors to make donation decisions and improve the ability of charitable foundations to raise funds.At the same time,negative media reports on the foundation will weaken the positive relationship between the quality of information disclosure of the charitable foundation and the donation income,which means that donors' donation decisions are also affected by the bad foundation reputation due to negative media reports.The research contribution of this paper mainly lies in the following aspects: Firstly,because China's charitable foundations are still in the initial stage of development compared with developed countries,there is lack of sufficient attention from the theoretical and practical circles and insufficient normative research and relatively few empirical research.Taking foundations in China as samples,this paper makes an empirical study on the governance effect of media supervision under the special Chinese institutional background and property rights structure,enriching the existing research literature on charitable foundations;Secondly,from the perspectives of resource dependence theory,principal-agent theory and signal transmission theory,it gives a theoretical explanation of the negative media reporting and information disclosure quality of foundations.On the basis of empirical research on the governance effect of media supervision of foundations,this paper explores the external governance of foundations through media supervision,which can guide the effective allocation of resources,alleviate the principal-agent problem,thus promote the healthy development of the foundations industry.