社交媒体关注、监管问询与公司并购OA北大核心CHSSCDCSSCICSTPCD

M&A plays an important role in business expansion and economic growth.In practice,due to the agency problem,listed companies call it by"market value management",but often launch destroying M&A deals.Listed companies often pay high premiums and form a large amount of goodwill.In the future,the impairment of goodwill will directly lead to large fluctuations in the company's performance and increase the risk of stock price collapse.Insiders and institutional investors have the advantage of information,reduce their stock holdings in a timely manner,and use the stock price bubble caused by M&As to transfer wealth.However,due to the complexity of M&A,retail investors are in a disadvantageous information position to identify M&A risks,thus easily being slaughtered lambs.With the increasing convenience of using internet by cellphone,social media has reshaped the way of information production,spreading and interpretation.Social media has been an important channel for retail investors to communicate and make investment decisions.Faced with decisions of listed companies that infringe on their interests,retail investors can quickly form alliances through social media to collectively voice their opinions and form a powerful public opinion force to influence the decisions of major shareholders or management.Relevant literature has also shown that social media have an impact on corporate decisions.For example,it can improve the quality of corporate information disclosure,curb surplus management,enhance the willingness of companies to pay out cash,and improve accounting robustness. For M&A decisions of public companies,social media aggregates the following governance roles.First,social media generates crowd wisdom through the collaboration of a large number of retail investors.Second,retail investors form alliances through social media,from which they express negative opinions on value-destroying M&A decisions.Finally,negative pressure from social media makes company management reduce opportunistic behavior and terminate value-destroying M&A.The governance role of the media needs the intervention of government authorities.Existing research has found that exchange inquiry letter plays the role of external supervision and governance.Therefore,this paper examines whether social media attention can change the disadvantageous position of retail investors in M&A,motivate management and shareholders to withdraw value-destroying M&As.Further we test the collaborative governance role of exchange inquiry letters. Based on the empirical test using the major M&As data of A-share listed companies in China from 2014 to 2018,this paper found the following conclusions.First of all,M&As with more negative comments in the East-money forum posts are more likely to be withdrawn.Specifically,the relationship between negative comments and M&A withdrawal is more significant when the transactions received inquiry letters.After excluding the interference of other media reports,using alternative variables,propensity score matching,instrumental variables and other robustness tests,the basic empirical results are consistent with the main test.Meanwhile,heterogeneity analysis shows that compared with other types,in common control M&As and non-cash payment M&As the governance role of inquiry letters is more significant.Finally,further tests show that M&As with more negative comments,the market reaction is worse,and the risk of stock price crash is higher.Inquiry letters reduce the negative market reactions and the risk of stock price crashes by reducing information asymmetry.The research shows that social media by aggregating and linking retail investors to form crowd wisdom,have influence on listed companies'M&A decisions.However,it is difficult to force listed companies to disclose more decision-related information by the power of social media alone.With the intervention of the regulatory inquiry letters to listed companies,it can prompt them to respond to social media concerns and form a governance function.This means that social media and inquiry letters form a synergy of supervision to change the passive situation of retail investors and promote the healthy development of the capital market. The theoretical contribution of this article is threefold.First,this paper enriches research on the economic consequences of social media governance.Existing literature on governance effects of social media mainly focuses on stock price and performance prediction.Different from existing literature,we study the impact of social media on corporate investment behavior,examining whether the negative discussion of social media affects corporate M&A withdrawal.Second,this study expands the research of exchanges supervision effect.Existing literature has found that inquiry letters have corporate governance,such as restraining excessive investment and improving investment efficiency.This paper focuses on the impact of regulatory inquiries on social media and M&A withdrawal,providing new evidence on the governance role of inquiry letters.Finally,this study expands the textual analysis research.Existing accounting and financial text-related literature mainly focuses on the analysis of the annual report.This paper analyzes social media texts and exchange inquiry letter texts,enriching the research on unstructured textual information of investors and regulators.