5.2. The Conditioning Effect of Provincial Information Accessibility―Test of H2a
Regrading H2a, we investigate whether the continued increasing public health threats in decreasing the accumulative abnormal return is weaker in firms that located in the provinces with stronger information accessibility. We suppose that stronger information accessibility will decrease the investors’ risk assessment by mitigating the information asymmetry. We apply three proxies (High_WEB, High_MED, and High_MOB) to represent stronger provincial information accessibility. Here, High_WEB is an indicator variable that equals one if the provincial ratio of the number of websites per 100 enterprises to resident population is higher than or equal to the upper quartile value and zero otherwise; High_MED is an indicator variable that equals one if the provincial TV coverage rate of population is higher than or equal to the upper quartile value and zero otherwise; and High_MOB is an indicator variable that equals one if the provincial ratio of flow accessed to mobile internet to resident population is higher than or equal to the upper quartile value and zero otherwise. For the H2a, we substitute Conditioning_VAR in Model (3) with High_WEB, High_MED, and High_MOB, respectively, and expect the coefficient of the interaction term is positive. Table 8 shows the regression results on H2a. We find that the interaction terms of CIPHT × High_WEB, CIPHT × High_MED, and CIPHT × High_MOB are positive and significant, which support the H2a that the negative effect of continued increasing provincial public health threats on market reaction is less pronounced when the provincial information accessibility is stronger (in terms of higher websites rate, higher media coverage, and higher mobile internet rate).