Voter mobilization campaigns face trade-offs in young democracies. In a large-scale experiment implemented in 2013 with the Kenyan Electoral Commission (IEBC), text messages intended to mobilize voters boosted participation but also decreased trust in electoral institutions after the election, a...

Do news media bias content in favor of advertisers? We examine the relationship between advertising by auto manufacturers in U.S. newspapers and news coverage of car safety recalls. This context allows us to separate the influence of advertisers, who prefer less coverage, from that of readers,...

Watching TV and other forms of media consumption represent, after sleeping and working, the main activity that adults perform in developed countries. We present a dynamic theory of commercial broadcasting where the media trade utility-raising goods (programs, information, and services) with...

We document how export quantities and prices evolve after entry to a market. Controlling for marginal cost, and taking account of selection on idiosyncratic demand, there are economically and statistically significant dynamics of quantities, but no dynamics of prices. To match these facts, we...

The FDA is considering using its regulatory authority over the tobacco industry to promote public health by restricting the advertising of menthol cigarettes. In this paper we contribute new empirical evidence on the effects of magazine advertisements for menthol cigarettes on cigarette demand....

Pharmaceutical firms currently spend over $4 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs, a nearly 30-fold increase since 1993 that has led to much debate about its value to patients. We examine how DTCA influences drug utilization along the extensive and intensive...

We measure the impact of direct-to-consumer television advertising (DTCA) by drug manufacturers. Our identification strategy exploits shocks to local advertising markets generated by idiosyncrasies of the political advertising cycle as well as a regulatory intervention affecting a single...

This paper explores how advertising impacts the consumer response to news about unobserved product quality. Specifically, we estimate how British Petroleum's (BP) 2000-2008 "Beyond Petroleum" advertising campaign affected the impact of the 2010 BP oil spill. We find that BP station margins...

We formally model direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs and examine factors that determine a pharmaceutical firm's DTCA strategy. We highlight how the profitability of DTCA varies with the characteristics of the condition that the advertised drug treats, the incidence of...

An extensive literature has studied lobbying by special interest groups. We analyze a novel lobbying channel: lobbying businessmen-politicians through business proxies. When a politician controls a business, firms attempting to curry favors shift their spending towards the politician's business....