How Do the Media Influence Government Decisions? Evidence from IPO Approval decisions

This is my OSP fellowship application. This project will investigate whether IPO firms seek rent from the media in the form of positive coverage and whether the media influence government decisions on IPO approval. We use Chinese A-stock companies submitting IPO applications for government approval from 2006 to 2017 as a sample, and manually collect and process a comprehensive dataset of newspapers to measure the tone of media coverage. The host institutions are Southwestern University of Finance and Economics and Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in China. We aim to submit our research papers to top-tier finance journals such as JFE, RFS and JFQA.