Date: September 15, 2021

Time: 15:45 - 17:30 pm

Venue: Room 0411, Teaching Building 0#, Jiuli Campus

Event Details:

Lecturer: Dr. Baixiao Liu

About the Lecturer:

Dr. Baixiao Liu, associate professor of finance (lifetime tenured professor), Florida State University School of Business. His research work has been published in top journals such as Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science and so on. He has a PhD in finance from Krannert School of Management at Purdue University in 2012 and an MBA from Krannert in 2008. In 2006, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Engineering from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. His research interests include financial media, short selling, and mergers & acquisitions.

About the Lecture:

Using the positive shift in tone of Fox News coverage of macroeconomic news after the Republican Bush election in 2000, we investigate whether media slant influences the investment decisions of short sellers. We find that firms headquartered in Republican-leaning townships with Fox News availability experienced a relative decrease in short interest post the 2000 election. We further find that the relative decrease is more pronounced for firms that are more subject to investors’ home bias. We interpret our findings to suggest that short sellers, as sophisticated as they may be, are not immune to the slant in media coverage.