We develop a monthly index of quot;badquot; news about China reported in the United States from January 1990 to December 2008. quot;Badquot; is defined as news touching on the following issues: human rights, Tibet, child labor, democracy, and repression. Using this bad news index, we document a...

Measures of bilateral political relations are typically long-memory (fractionally integrated) processes. Appropriate inference and interpretation of this property hinges on the underlying reasons behind it. There are three possible explanations: (i) mechanical aggregation, (ii) bilateral...

An extensive number of studies investigate the effects of political relations on trade by estimating a gravity model using annual (or quarterly) data. We argue that the use of low-frequency data introduces an aggregation bias because the cycle of moderate political shocks is much shorter...

Many scholars argue that a sizable share of the news about China published in U.S. newspapers engages in “China Bashing.” This paper quantifies the extent of the bashing and examines its effect on Sino-American relations. To measure bashing, I develop an index based on the count of articles...