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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45361 |
| Date | 22 November 2022 |
| Creators | Wu, Meng |
| Contributors | Fisman, Raymond J. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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