Do Ads Influence Editors? Advertising and Bias in the Financial Media
Do Ads Influence Editors? Advertising and Bias in the Financial Media
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.614583
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发表时间：
2005-08
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
J. Reuter;Eric Zitzewitz
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
J. Reuter;Eric Zitzewitz
我们使用共同基金推荐来测试编辑内容是否独立于广告商在金融媒体中的影响力。我们发现，主要的个人理财杂志（Money，Kiplinger's Personal Finance和SmartMoney）更有可能推荐过去在其页面上做过广告的家庭的基金，控制费用，过去的回报和广告的整体水平等基金特征。我们发现，在《纽约时报》或《华尔街日报》上，几乎没有证据表明存在类似的关系。媒体在报纸和杂志上的正面报道与基金未来的大量流入有关，而广告支出则不然。因此，如果我们从因果关系的角度来解释我们的系数，那么在我们的个人理财杂志样本中，广告的很大一部分好处来自于明显的内容偏见。然而，这种明显的偏见对福利的影响尚不清楚，因为我们的测试表明，偏见并不会直接导致出版物推荐未来回报率明显低于没有任何偏见的基金。在选择推荐的基金时，杂志会将过去的回报率相对于费用进行加权，作为一个群体，他们的推荐甚至不会超过同等加权的同行平均值。然而，这种方法使杂志拥有大量过去回报率高的基金，可以从中选择，因此可以适应对广告商的偏见，而不会显着减少读者的未来回报。有趣的是，不接受广告的《消费者报告》的建议，其未来回报率与接受广告的出版物相当或低于后者。
We use mutual fund recommendations to test whether editorial content is independent from advertisers’ influence in the financial media. We find that major personal finance magazines (Money, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, and SmartMoney) are more likely to recommend funds from families that have advertised within their pages in the past, controlling for fund characteristics like expenses, past returns and the overall levels of advertising. We find little evidence of a similar relationship for mentions in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Positive media mentions in both newspapers and magazines are associated with significant future inflows into the fund while advertising expenditures are not. Therefore, if we interpret our coefficients causally, a large share of the benefit of advertising in our sample of personal finance magazines comes via the apparent content bias. The welfare implications of this apparent bias are unclear, however, since our tests suggest that bias does not directly lead publications to recommend funds with significantly lower future returns than they might have recommended in the absence of any bias. In selecting funds to recommend, magazines overweight past returns relative to expenses, and as a group their recommendations do not outperform even an equal- weighted average of their peers. Nevertheless, this approach leaves magazines with large numbers of funds with high past returns from which to select, and so bias towards advertisers can be accommodated without significantly reducing readers’ future returns. Interestingly, the recommendations of Consumer Reports, which does not accept advertising, have future returns comparable to or below those of the publications which accept do advertising.