Since the dawn of broadcasting, and especially in the past decade, Americans have turned their attention from local to more distant sources of news and entertainment. While the integration of media markets will raise the private welfare of many consumers, a globalized information and...

Media outlets often present diverging, even conflicting, perspectives on reality -- not only informing, but potentially misinforming audiences. We study the extent to which misinformation broadcast on mass media at the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic influenced health outcomes. We first...

In most settings, it is difficult to measure discrimination, and even more challenging to distinguish between competing theories of discrimination (taste-based versus information-based). Using contestant voting behavior on the television game show Weakest Link, one can in principle empirically...

<i>This paper was motivated by <a href="/papers/w19795">an earlier NBER working paper</a>. The authors of that paper have posted <a href="https://www.nber.org/data-appendix/w19795/KL_Response_to_JJK-JBES-July_2018_FINAL.pdf">a response to this paper</a>. <a href=" /papers/w24857">Another NBER working paper</a> addresses issues in both of these papers.</i>

In this paper, we investigate viewer responses to changes in the ideological content of television programming using variation induced by cadenas, unannounced takeovers of the public television airwaves by the government in Venezuela. Using high-frequency ratings data, we find that, consistent...

We investigate the welfare effects of vertical integration of regional sports networks (RSNs) with programming distributors in U.S. multichannel television markets. Vertical integration can enhance efficiency by reducing double marginalization and increasing carriage of channels, but can also...

This paper investigates whether preschool children exposed to Sesame Street when it began in 1969 experienced improved educational and labor market outcomes subsequently. We exploit geographic variation in broadcast reception derived from technological limitations, including distance to a...

We seek to estimate the prestige value of winning beyond monetary prizes in Cutthroat Kitchen, a cooking show in which dishes are judged in a series of elimination rounds, with the twist that action is periodically paused to auction sabotages against rivals. We estimate the distribution of...

This paper studies the market provision of a specific type of public good: radio and television broadcasts. Its main focus is to explore the ability of the market to provide broadcasting efficiently in a world in which broadcasters earn revenues by selling time to advertisers and advertisements...

Theory predicts that in markets with increasing returns, the number of differentiated products and resulting consumer satisfaction grow in market size. We document this phenomenon across 246 US radio markets. By a mechanism that we term 'preference externalities', an increase in the size of the...