Corporate Governance Role of Media Supervise——Empirical Evidence from Companies that Implement Equity Incentive Plans

A test is conducted on listed companies that implemented equity incentive plan as samples after the announcement of the Measures for the Administration of Equity Incentives of Listed Companies(trial) between January 1st, 2006 and June 30st, 2011. A news search engine is used to collect the sample companies' equity incentive, and identify the negative media coverage by using content analysis method. The degree of negative media attention is measured by the number of negative equity incentive media report, and the corporate governance role of the media is measured by the degree of responses to the media reports. The logistic analysis is applied to study corporate governance role of media supervision. The conclusion is that with more negative equity incentive reports, the company is more likely to amend the equity incentive program to respond to the median question and consummate its incentive management mechanism. To some extent, our research confirmed that media can oversight listed companies and play a positive role of improving corporate governance so as to protect the interests of investors.