I examine the cross-country variation in the effectiveness of the media's corporate governance role. I find this role to be more effective in countries with greater societal trust or concern for shareholder wealth maximization. In those countries, news coverage of value-destroying acquisition attempts leads to a higher likelihood of acquisition abandonment. By contrast, the effectiveness of the media's governance role does not vary directly with the status of local media freedom. The results imply that a society's shared values, such as trust or concern for shareholder wealth maximization, play an important role in the media's watchdog function. 1 For the purpose of this paper, "the media" refers to a single entity comprising a country's printed news. 2 The media's role in diffusing information and its contribution to the efficiency of the stock market is documented in Peress (2014). Tetlock (2010) presents a model and empirical evidence that public news reduces asymmetrically held information in stock trading.

Discretionary accruals reflect the management’s accounting choices made within the flexibility of accounting standards. Discretionary accruals can be used by the management to better reflect the economic value of the firm and to signal their private information about a firm’s future prospects to the market, but they can also be used opportunistically by managers. However, the prior literature documents mixed evidence related to the information content in discretionary accruals. Thus, we examine the association between discretionary accruals and analysts’ forecast dispersion to provide further evidence on the information content in discretionary accruals. Moreover, as greater external monitoring and rigorous ESG management allow less room for manager’s manipulation of discretionary accruals, we investigate whether greater external monitoring by institutional owners and higher ESG scores moderate the relationship between discretionary accruals and analysts’ disagreements on long-term EPS growth forecasts. We find a positive association between discretionary accruals and analysts’ forecast dispersion, which suggests there is low information content in discretionary accruals. Furthermore, we find that a greater concentration in institutional ownership, greater blockholders’ institutional ownership, and a positive ESG score mitigate the positive relationship between discretionary accruals and analysts’ forecast dispersion. Thus, better external monitoring and higher quality ESG enhance the information credibility of a firm’s disclosure.