Political Risk, Media Framing, and Heuristics in Sovereign Bond Markets

My dissertation project - entitled Political Risk, Media Framing, and Heuristics in Sovereign Bond Markets - investigates the critical role of news media as the producers and framers of financial information and its effects on investors’ portfolio allocation decisions. Two main questions motivate the project. First, how does the media frame sovereign bond crises and, in particular, the creditworthiness of the debtor countries involved? Second, does the media framing of a sovereign country affect investors’ portfolio allocation decisions? If so, how? The first part of the dissertation (Chapter 1 and 2) tackles the first question with respect to the recent eurozone crisis.1 The second part of the dissertation (Chapter 3 and 4) inverts the causal arrow and explores how media framing can influence, rather than being influenced by, sovereign bond markets