Does the Agenda-Setting Effect Always Work?

Abstract

The media is viewed as an external mechanism of corporate governance in a large body of literature. In agenda-setting research, the media can exert influence on corporate emissions behavior by controlling the public and government agenda. However, it is unclear whether such effect will be influenced by the regional institutional environment. The authors construct a theoretical framework including different types of media and corporate environmental behavior, which is used to investigate the impact of institution informatization on the media agenda-setting effect. The authors then used a sample of Chinese industrial enterprises from 2011 to 2014 to test this hypothesis. The empirical results reveal that both printing and electronic media elicit improvement on corporate environmental performance. Institutional informatization can significantly enhance the disincentive effect of electronic media on corporate emissions, while the moderating role in the relationship between printing media and corporate emissions is not significant.