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yes / The ideology of the liberal peace has propelled the political economies of war-torn societies into a scheme of global convergence towards ¿market liberalisation¿. This orthodoxy was an uncontestable assumption underlying external economic assistance. However, the project faltered under its inherent contradictions and because it ignored the socio-economic problems confronting war-torn societies, even aggravating them by increasing the vulnerability of populations to poverty and shadow economic activity. Although revisionists have embarked on a mission to boost the UN¿s peacebuilding capacity and also rescue the Millennium Development Goals, the basic assumptions of the liberal peace are not challenged and potential alternatives are overlooked.

Cambodia underwent a triple transition in the 1990s: from war to peace, from communism to electoral democracy, and from command economy to free market. This book addresses the political economy of these transitions, examining how the much publicised international intervention to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia was subverted by the poverty of the Cambodian economy and by the state's manipulation of the move to the free market. This analysis of the material basis of obstacles to Cambodia's democratisation suggests that the long-established theoretical link between economy and democracy stands, even in the face of new strategies of international democracy promotion.

The organizing theme of this dissertation is media and ownership. The first and second chapters explore how media content is influenced by its ownership, using commercial media outlets in the U.S. and government-owned media in China respectively. The third chapter studies how Research and Development efficiency differs across listed firms of various ownership structures. In the first chapter, I explore what determines the media slant towards foreign nations using the 2018-2019 Sino-U.S. trade negotiation as a testing ground. Using an event study design and coverage by local U.S. newspapers, I analyze how stories about China respond to shifts in U.S. policy towards China, and how this media reaction is determined by owners' partisan affinity, controlling for readers' characteristics. I find that local newspapers with Republican-leaning owners increase the intensity of negative coverage following a shift towards hostile trade policies relative to papers of nonpartisan owners, and they decrease this slant following a conciliatory shift; the opposite is true for Democratic-leaning media owners. To address the potential endogeneity of diplomatic events, I select events that induced significant abnormal price fluctuations of trade-war-related financial securities. I further establish a causal effect of owners' preferences by exploiting mergers and acquisitions among national conglomerates as a source of variation in the political orientation of owners. These findings imply a spillover from the domestic policy in forming citizens' sentiment towards other nations: the media, as their lens to view the world, is colored by domestic political polarization. In the second chapter, I study how political competition among provincial officials affects media criticism in China. I collect news reports of local mouthpiece outlets operated by local provincial governments that at least point out the weakness of local governance from 2004 to 2017. By exploiting the semi-randomness of the pairing of the provincial governor and the party sectary, based on an established fact that bureaucrats are likely to be promoted in their third or fourth year (hereafter referred to as the examination period), I show with a DID setting that competition induces media criticism. Specifically, compared with pairs without an overlapped examination period, pairs assigned with an overlapped period 1) observe higher criticism, especially on economic improvement, during the secretary's examination period; 2) show better joint economic performance; 3) demonstrate a positive correlation between media criticism and secretaries' promotion, especially when the GDP growth rate is mediocre. The intuition can be illustrated by a principal-agent model with adverse selection. When individual signals are not observed, the secretary sends a media signal to take more credit for the joint performance. In the third chapter, we empirically investigate how state-owned firms differ from non-state-owned firms in their R&D efficiency. We estimate the economic value of invention patents granted to Chinese publicly listed firms using the stock market's responses to patent issuances, following the methodology proposed in Kogan, Papanikolaou, Seru, and Stoffman (2017). We measure the return of R&D by dividing the future patent value by current R&D expenditure, and find that the state-owned firms' R&D efficiency is higher with very low R&D intensity, and is lower for medium and high R&D intensity. This finding is robust across different specifications, with both non-parametric and parametric models.

<p> This research paper is a study of conflict over development in an urban society. The Marxist/Political Economy explanation of urban phenomena is employed throughout as a basis for analysis. Two specific development cases are discussed: the first case is the proposal to rezone property to permit a medical office and the second is the application to build an apartment complex on a piece of land that contains an historical building. The purpose of this paper is to explain how and why conflict occurs over development, taking into account the different facets of the Marxist/Political Economy perspective. Emphasis is given to the discussion of the roles that local government, the planners, the residents and the developers played in the decisions over the actual proposals for development. It is concluded that the Marxist/Political Economy perspective is the most advantageous to use in a discussion of urban conflict. This study of conflict is important for the urban geographer who wishes to explain this type of human interaction. Since urban geographers are interested in comprehending the city and its functions, it is important to begin by understanding the people, the most significant components of the city. </p> / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy

China’s attitude and foreign policies in global financial governance are not consistent. A two-stage model, which is comprised of formation of Guojia Liyi (interests and preferences of China, 国家利益) (Stage I) and decision-making process (Stage II), is established to explain China’s policy inconsistency in global financial governance. Through this model, the thesis makes two major explanations for policy inconsistency. First, China’s Guojia Liyi in various global financial governance institutions and/or events may be different. These different Guojia Liyi are constituted by personal epistemic interests, interests of the state and national interests and are constrained by both material and ideational factors, particularly the domestic and international political economic environment, state ideology and interpretation. Therefore, China’s policies based on these Guojia Liyi vary. Second, even if the Guojia Liyi formed are the same in different events or institutions, the final actions are not always in accordance to the Guojia Liyi due to the influence of some factors on the specific decision-making process, such as lobbying, institutional conflicts and others. The two-stage model explains the policy inconsistency through both ontological and epistemological integration. Ontologically, this model considers structure and agent and treats both state and decision- makers as units of analysis. Epistemologically, this model incorporates both rational and cognitive school of thoughts by separating Guojia Liyi formation with specific decision- making processes and considering time as a crucial variable. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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