The thesis consists of three essays in development and political economics. Political Connection, Government Patronage and Firm Performance: Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Firms The paper tests whether politically connected firms receive preferential favor from the government, as measured by state capital investment from the central government and subsidies. My results suggest that firms connected with one more top leader from the State Council receive 9.4 percent more subsidies, firms connected with one more leader who holds positions on both the Central Committee and the State Council obtain 23 percent more state capital and then have a 2 percentage point higher product markup. When there is extra state capital due to political connections, other domestic capital is crowded out. The heterogeneous effects find that firms with more employees, but lower sales and less profit tend to receive more state capital if equally connected, while firms with higher sales tend to obtain more subsidies. This additional state capital and these subsidies do not seem to improve the firm's performance. The Determinants of Media Bias in China We measure and investigate the determinants of political control of newspapers in China. We find that more strictly politically controlled newspapers cover disasters and corruption more than their commercial competitors, most likely in order to monitor lower level officials. We also find that they cover leaders and the official news agency Xinhua to a larger extent. We find that in the cross section, the political control correlates negatively with GDP per capita and population size, but there is no time trend in the political control of Chinese newspapers in the 2000s. Finally, we analyze the effect of a reform to close down all county papers in 2003. The reduced competition significantly affected the degree of political control of the remaining papers. Chinese Microblogs and Drug Quality This paper examines the impact of the introduction of Sina Weibo, the most popular microblog in China, on the quality of drugs on the market. I find that the number of bad drugs is decreasing in Sina Weibo use: if the Sina Weibo use is doubled, the number of bad drugs found will be reduced by 21 percent. I show that the reduction of bad drugs is driven by two mechanisms: Sina Weibo induces more effort from the Drug Administration and it deters the production of bad drugs. The results suggest that microblogs can play an important role in monitoring both the public and the private sectors, especially in a context with media censorship.

This study examined framing in two Bulgarian television stations and their web sites. Framing within the web sites' news coverage of the United States was examined during the one-month period immediately following the 2008 United States presidential election. The news articles gathered from the two web sites were examined for amount of coverage, frame presence and valence, as well as hyperlinks, in order to offer insight into the fields of gatekeeping, framing, and corporate ownership bias. Suggestions of bias were found in terms of the overall tone of the articles but not in the amount of coverage. There was a significant difference between the two web sites in the tone of coverage concerning individuals and events. / Master of Arts

近年來，媒體偏頗（media bias）的現象愈來愈引起經濟學家的注意。本文指出，即便媒體本身的意識型態中立，他們仍然有誘因為了迎合閱聽眾的口味而帶著立場扭曲他們的報導。比較有趣的是，在這篇文章中，即使沒有在文獻中提到的價格競爭或是媒體考量本身聲譽的效果，在一些普遍的情況下，新聞媒體的意識型態仍會傾向兩極化。另外，我們也指出，這樣的兩極化現象，會透過媒體與閱聽眾之間的交互影響輕易地深化。 / Media bias has been attracting more and more attention of economists in recent years. This essay shows that, even the media firms are ideologically neutral, they still have incentives to slant their news to cater to the audience or readers. An interesting feature of this paper is that, even though without reputation and price competition effects proposed in the literature, the ideology of news reported is apt to be polarized under some situations which are very common in reality. We also show that polarization could be easily deepened through some interaction between media firms and news consumers.

Using secondary data from Pew's Early January 2004 Political Communications Study this thesis explains political identification, the range of media sources that a person uses, perceptions of political party bias and political participation using information about media use and perceptions of the media. The survey, which was conducted during the winter of 2003/2004, includes responses from 1506 individuals. Analytic techniques include means breakdowns, crosstabulations, correlations and multiple regression. Many associations are identified; however, in general, the media related variables were weakly related to dependent variables. The thesis speculates that the weak relationships can be attributed to a homogeneous range of available media content. Connections between the recent growth in the number of media sources and diversity in media content are discussed. The analysis finds that listening to talk radio, religious radio and watching the Fox News Channel were weakly associated with conservatism while use of non-profit media, including use of National Public Radio (NPR), the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) were weakly associated with liberalism. The thesis questions if the use of "sound bites" used on talk radio programs and some 24-hour television news channels is related to the conservatism of these audiences. A positive relationship between the amount of bias that a person sees in the news media and the range of news sources that a person uses was found. Sources include Internet, television and print media. The implications of these findings in the context of the agenda-setting framework and a homogenous media are discussed. Use of the Fox News Channel and talk radio were associated with perceptions of a Democratic Party bias in the news media. Ideas from Bourdieu and Passeron are used to understand how communication styles are related to the perception of talk radio as an alternative to the "liberal media". The implications of the prevalence of the perception of a "liberal media" are discussed and related to theoretical work from Gramsci and Abercrombie. Media that attempt to add diversity through new operational models are described. Associations between political participation and several types of media use were found. The finding that use of comedy television is related to some indicators of political participation is seen as demonstrating the difficulty in distinguishing information from entertainment-oriented programming. The analysis questions assumptions about the relationships between media use, electoral cynicism and political participation. The thesis argues that better tools from examining media use in general and in the Canadian context are needed.

Using secondary data from Pew's Early January 2004 Political Communications Study this thesis explains political identification, the range of media sources that a person uses, perceptions of political party bias and political participation using information about media use and perceptions of the media. The survey, which was conducted during the winter of 2003/2004, includes responses from 1506 individuals. Analytic techniques include means breakdowns, crosstabulations, correlations and multiple regression. Many associations are identified; however, in general, the media related variables were weakly related to dependent variables. The thesis speculates that the weak relationships can be attributed to a homogeneous range of available media content. Connections between the recent growth in the number of media sources and diversity in media content are discussed. The analysis finds that listening to talk radio, religious radio and watching the Fox News Channel were weakly associated with conservatism while use of non-profit media, including use of National Public Radio (NPR), the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) were weakly associated with liberalism. The thesis questions if the use of "sound bites" used on talk radio programs and some 24-hour television news channels is related to the conservatism of these audiences. A positive relationship between the amount of bias that a person sees in the news media and the range of news sources that a person uses was found. Sources include Internet, television and print media. The implications of these findings in the context of the agenda-setting framework and a homogenous media are discussed. Use of the Fox News Channel and talk radio were associated with perceptions of a Democratic Party bias in the news media. Ideas from Bourdieu and Passeron are used to understand how communication styles are related to the perception of talk radio as an alternative to the "liberal media". The implications of the prevalence of the perception of a "liberal media" are discussed and related to theoretical work from Gramsci and Abercrombie. Media that attempt to add diversity through new operational models are described. Associations between political participation and several types of media use were found. The finding that use of comedy television is related to some indicators of political participation is seen as demonstrating the difficulty in distinguishing information from entertainment-oriented programming. The analysis questions assumptions about the relationships between media use, electoral cynicism and political participation. The thesis argues that better tools from examining media use in general and in the Canadian context are needed.

This thesis explores how media has reported on the Darfur conflict as a climate conflict. For that purpose a media analysis has been carried out that analyses quantitative data through four different cases from different parts of the world. In order to get this data a quantitative content analysis has been carried out. The analysis has been carried out by using a media policy framework that enables the data to be classified in three different categories depending on the level of elite consensus and policy uncertainty on the matter at hand. This thesis concludes that media around the world have been reporting on climate change as a contributing factor depending on how that argument can be used to serve their geo-strategic policy on the conflict. In that sense climate change is mainly brought up as a way to relieve the Sudanese government of its responsibility in the conflict.

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in their breakthrough work, The Race Beat, contended that mainstream newspapers—white newspapers—largely ignored the black community until the 1950s and 1960s when editors gradually began opening their pages to reports of racial discrimination and the emerging protest against segregation. This coverage significantly shaped the civil rights movement, Roberts and Klibanoff argued. “Unfamiliar Streets” offers nuance to their narrative. Examining the local coverage of the 1960 Chattanooga sit-in movement as a case study, Jessie Harris contends that reporters and editors, although they should be credited for extensively covering the sit-ins, ultimately cared more for civilities than civil rights. Their coverage detailed the protests, fights, and mobs downtown, but only rarely provided perspectives of student demonstrators and rarely called attention to the injustices of segregation.

Thesis advisor: Hideo Konishi / My doctoral dissertation consists of three chapters on political economy and public economics. The first chapter discusses the effect of media bias on a voting competition. The second chapter focuses on how residents respond to increasing natural disaster risks in a multi-community framework. The third chapter investigates a coalition formation game with congestion effects. In chapter 1, I present a two-party election model with media noise. The media may provide polarized messages instead of those that explain the parties' actual policies. The rational voter relies on the media as an imperfect information source regarding a party's platform. Given this framework, I show that Downsian policy convergence is not valid. Moreover, when a party's ideology is relatively strong and the media bias is significant, one-sided polarization can occur: the party with more imprecise reports may adopt a more extreme strategy, whereas its opponent is more of a centrist in a perfect Bayesian equilibrium. This occurs when one party is misrepresented more often, causing the voter to think that the other party has more incentive to polarize. Therefore, the voter may favor the highly misrepresented party, which gives that party more room to polarize. I also show that parties never gain from these increasing misrepresentations, and a biased media environment can negatively affect the voter's welfare. My results suggest that the public should pursue a balanced media environment. Global warming and climate change have become increasingly important. In chapter 2, I investigate a local public goods economy using a new element: location-specific risks of disasters. Agents in this economy ``vote with their feet'' by choosing their favorite location as their residential base. In each location, all residents use majority rule to decide the local wealth tax rate and the amount of local public goods provision that can reduce the loss caused by disasters. I show that the equilibrium is wealth stratified if preferences are represented by a homothetic Stone-Geary utility function. Moreover, when disaster risks at a location increase, the population usually moves away from that location and the housing rents consequently decrease. Meanwhile, the housing rents and tax rates increase at the location the residents shift to. Moreover, I use this framework to numerically evaluate two policies: foreign donation and inter-jurisdiction transfer. If developed countries provides subsidies to a location with greater risks in a developing country, wealthier agents in the recipient country may move into the said location and force poorer agents to move out. This effect makes the wealthier the direct beneficiary of the foreign subsidy. Furthermore, I find that the inter-jurisdiction transfer may harm the poorer by rising housing rents. In chapter 3, I consider a coalition-formation problem, in which there is a set of feasible alternatives for each coalition and each player's payoff is affected by the coalition she belongs to and by its chosen alternative. In this chapter, I focus on ``congestion effects'': an agent's payoff goes down as an additional player joins the coalition other things being equal. The equilibrium notion considered is ``stability": a stable allocation (pairs of coalition structure and alternatives chosen by each coalition) is an allocation such that no coalition has an incentive to deviate from it. I find quite robust counterexamples to show that stability may fail to exist even under strong preference conditions such as the intermediate preference property and single peakedness. Nevertheless, I show a sufficient condition for the nonemptiness of stability: congruent-pair solvability. I also provide some results on the ``Nash-like" equilibrium notion. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

This thesis looks at the economics of mass media from a variety of perspectives. The main aim is to analyse the key factors that influence media reporting behaviour, and in turn the impact of reportage on individual decision-making processes. The first chapter provides a brief summary of the contextual background of this thesis, by presenting the main points tackled in the subsequent chapters as well as a concise overview of the main contributions across various fields of study. The second chapter explores the relationship between advertisers and the media using a simple model of horizontal and vertical product differentiation in a duopolistic setting. In this framework, when a news story is published one firm will benefit in terms of higher consumer demand and profits, while the other will suffer. Firms can influence the media's decision to publish the news story or withhold it via advertising expenditure. The main result shows that in equilibrium when news signals conform to people's prior beliefs, extreme or strong stories will be withheld from publication by the media. This is because strong stories will result in a drastic decline in profits for one firm, thus providing it with an incentive to switch over and change its production process to mimic the other (beneficiary) firm, thereby eliminating vertical product differentiation. Therefore, the beneficiary firm would have an incentive to ensure that the news story is withheld to prevent this increase in competition and the subsequent erosion of its profit margins. The results provide an alternative rationale to explain recent evidence on under-reporting by the U.S. media in relation to various issues like climate change and the nutritional content of food. The third chapter looks at the responsiveness of individual private behaviour to media coverage of a particular news story. Survey data on charitable gift-giving in the U.S. are used in order to analyse the impact of newspaper coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on both the likelihood and magnitude of monetary disbursements towards the relief effort. The identification strategy employed in this paper exploits differences in county-level growth rates of violent crime in order to account for the variation in newspaper coverage of the tsunami, thus circumventing potential endogeneity problems. The results show that media coverage only had a modest effect on people's decision to donate or not, but conversely had a significant and non-trivial impact on the amount of money donated. Furthermore, this impact was larger for young adults within the 25-34 age bracket and individuals who had undertaken some form of voluntary work in the previous year. These results hold even after the implementation of various robustness tests, and serve to highlight the growing influence of the media on people's behaviour. The final chapter analyses the impact of media reports on electoral outcomes, and in particular the extent to which soft or sensationalist news reportage influences voting. Survey data on individual voting behaviour during the 2000 U.S. Presidential election is used, together with a novel dataset on the amount of coverage afforded to the Monica Lewinsky scandal over the period January 17, 1998 to August 31, 2000. We first show that Lewinsky coverage was not driven by the newspapers' political bias, but rather by other factors including tabloid journalism. This independence enables us to focus solely on the impact of media reports on voting, in contrast to the rest of the literature which deals with the electoral influence of politically-biased media outlets. We then look at how newspaper coverage of the Lewinsky scandal influenced voting patterns in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. To account for potential endogeneity issues we use county-level variation in the number of deaths caused by extreme weather events as an instrument for Lewinsky articles. We find that media coverage of the scandal had a positive and statistically significant impact on the likelihood of voting for George W. Bush, and conversely a negative influence on the probability of voting for Al Gore: this pattern is visible among both Democrats and Republicans. The results are robust to various tests, and raise several questions regarding the media's role within the democratic process.

Chapter one focuses on optimal pricing in markets of consumption chains. These are markets in which one good is necessary for access to further consumption goods. I analyse optimal pricing for different market structures, focusing on the case of an integrated monopolist and the case of separate firms being in competition across markets, but not within markets. I then compare the outcomes of different market structures using basic welfare measures. I show that, compared to the first best allocation, the allocation implemented under the integrated monopolist tends to have significantly lower consumer surplus and larger producer surplus. Aggregate welfare is surprisingly not much smaller under the integrated firm when compared to a welfare maximising allocation. In some settings the integrated monopolist even implements a welfare maximising allocation. The paper explains and highlights how these results depend largely on which assumptions are made about the information available to consumers. The second chapter contributes towards the existing literatures on lobbying and on media bias by combining and extending features of both. It aims to analyse optimal slanting policies of interest or media groups and their effect on the distribution of public opinion and its evolution over time by introducing an intertemporal model of grassroots lobbying or media bias. I also allow for more general results than existing models by making fewer distributive assumptions and by allowing for further incentives of agents. In the chapter I combine demand and supply side models for bias. A main focus lies on how optimal slanting, the distribution of public opinion and its evolution over time depend on competition. The chapter aims to examine in which circumstances competition in the media market or the existence of multiple rival lobby groups can be detrimental. It shows how this can be the case because competition can create an incentive to split the public up and cater only to the own market. This can lead to a loss of the middle ground and increased dispersion of public opinion. The third chapter aims to extend the existing literature on the (in)efficiencies of voluntary contribution mechanisms for public goods. The existing body of research tries to analyse how group size affects the outcomes of such mechanisms asymptotically, while I also focus on results for given group sizes and the effect of the level of group heterogeneity in combination with group size. Agents are ex post heterogeneous in the existing literature; I also allow for them to be heterogeneous ex ante. This means that agents do not only have different valuations for the public good ex post, but different agents are also perceived differently by other agents ex ante. I show that a form of price discrimination can be used when agents are ex ante heterogeneous. Not using such price discrimination is shown to be costly in terms of efficiency in small groups. Small heterogeneous groups are outperformed by their homogeneous counterparts when price discrimination is not applied. However, this inefficiency in small groups can be eliminated by using price discrimination. The use of price discrimination becomes irrelevant in large groups and heterogeneous groups always outperform their homogeneous counterparts, whether price discrimination is used or not.