Essays on Inter-firm Ownership Network and Social Media Marketing

There has been a growing debate on big data and analytics in recent years. Applying analytics to big data creates many opportunities for managers and policy makers to gain greater insight into their business so that they can improve their decision-making. This thesis employs novel approaches of data science to study economic and managerial topics. In particular, we combine the traditional econometric models with novel network measures and machine learning algorithms in exploring the big and high dimensional data of global inter-firm ownership network and Chinese C2C sellers’ microblogs in social media, so as to provide managerial strategies for both firm-level and individual business. The first two studies investigate inter-firm ownership network and firm performance. By analysing the data of Italian firms in the period of debt crisis, the first study provides a deep insight into the relationship between firm performance and the interaction of firm-level centrality and business group size. The findings, together with the novel centrality measure we provide, contribute to the literature on inter-firm ownership network. The second study explores foreign ownership and firm performance from various perspectives. The results reveal that the foreignowned Italian firms are on average more productive than the ones in domestic-owned MNEs. In addition, we find that the Italian subsidiary with shorter organizational and geographical distance from their foreign owners are on average more productive. The third study focuses on business in social media. By exploiting the fact that Sina Weibo collaborates with Taobao (Chinas largest C2C ecommerce platform) to provide their sellers an easier way to promote their products using microblogs, we are able to examine the relationship between marketing aggressiveness and marketing popularity. Interestingly, we identify an optimal level of how aggressive Taobao sellers should be when promoting their products over SinaWeibo. This finding contributes to the existing literature on social media marketing, especially in the field of C2C business.