Identifying causal mechanisms is a fundamental goal of social science. Researchers seek to
study not only whether one variable affects another but also how such a causal relationship …

We live in a world where the internet and the world wide web have, in the matter of only
three decades, shifted from being at the forefront of a new frontier of communication …

Does media bias affect voting? We analyze the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its
impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News …

I examine the learning process that economic agents use to update their expectation of an
uncertain and infrequently observed event. I use a new nation-wide panel dataset of large …

We estimate the impact of press coverage on citizen knowledge, politicians' actions, and
policy. We find that voters living in areas where, for exogenous reasons, the press covers …

We use new data on entries and exits of US daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate
effects on political participation, party vote shares, and electoral competitiveness. Our …

Has the decline in traditional sources of local news contributed to the nationalization of US
elections? I hypothesize that local news coverage mitigates nationalization by providing …

We present a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in
media freedom across countries and over time. Media bias is greater and state ownership of …

We study the persuasive effects of political advertising. Our empirical strategy exploits FCC
regulations that result in plausibly exogenous variation in the number of impressions across …

As long as there has been democratic government, skeptics have worried that citizens would
base their choices and their votes on superficial considerations. A series of recent studies …