The effects and applicability of financial media reports on corporate default ratings

We propose a corporate default rating process for the Taiwan Stock Market which incorporates financial ratios, corporate governance, macroeconomic variables and financial media reports. Multi-measurements of the 'distress intensity of default-corpus' (DIDC) using linguistic analysis are constructed, whilst also examining the explanatory power of the DIDC on financial distress events. The DIDC related to the distressed firms rises significantly prior to the distressed event and the volatility of the DIDC for them exhibits more fluctuations than for the non-distressed companies. Besides, we propose a systematic process for the evaluation of default ratings, with the results for all listed stocks in the Taiwan Stock Market showing that the accuracy of the model with the incorporation of the DIDC outperforms other candidate models. Financial institutions and credit rating agencies could effectively adjust firms' ratings by referring to both the general default rating model and financial media reports. We suggest that this process of quantifying Chinese media reports and evaluating default ratings with social media could be further applied to the Greater China stock market.