Web-based Empirical Appendix Authority, Incentives and Performance: Theory and Evidence from a Chinese Newspaper

I undertook the main field work in the summer of 2007. The external data were coded mainly in the summer of 2009, with financial support from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. From 2007 to 2009, I conducted numerous formal and informal interviews with reporters, managing editors, chief editors and CEO of the Newspaper, a number of journalists from other Chinese newspapers, and several industrial regulators. The Newspaper provided the internal performance measures of all its employed reporters from 2003 to 2006, and personnel information of its employees from 2002 to 2006. I directly obtained from the IT department of the Newspaper the following information: the number of articles, the number of words, the quantity score and the quality score. Then I confirmed the data with the reporters’wage bills, which contained information about the quantity and quality scores. The personnel information of all the reporters and editors was provided by the Human Resource department of the Newspaper. Missing and inconsistent information was completed or corrected through other sources. The news content was downloaded from the publicly accessible website of the Newspaper and organized into archives for each reporter in the sample. A team of three Chinese college students, directed by an experienced journalist, coded every article by reading its title, authorship, byline, lead paragraph, and other information such as formats (column, labeling) and pictures according to a set of specified rules (described in Table A1 below). To set the coding rules, I constructed preliminary instructions based on the quality score assignment