Politicians seeking reelection need voters to know what they have done for them. Thus, incentives may arise to spend more money where media coverage is higher. We present a simple model to explain the allocation of public spending across jurisdictions contingent on media activity. An incumbent...

Journalism is widely believed to be crucial for holding elected officials accountable. At the same time economic theory has a hard time providing a straightforward explanation for the phenomenon of "accountability journalism". According to the common Downsian reasoning, rational voters should...

Being able to read and write is one of the most important skills in modern economies. Literacy frequently is a prerequisite for employment and its relevance for productivity and wages is magnified by the fact that it is only through literacy that many other skills become usable. More so than for...

Politicians seeking reelection need voters to know what they have done for them. Thus, incentives may arise to spend more money where media coverage is higher. We present a simple model to explain the allocation of public spending across jurisdictions contingent on media activity. An incumbent...

Whenever citizens want their elected officials to employ funds efficiently, they are in need of information in order to establish accountability. We develop an agency model with imperfect monitoring where newspapers provide voters with this information. The model predicts that an informed...

This paper complements previous studies on the effects of health on wages by addressing the problems of unobserved heterogeneity, sample selection, and endogeneity in one comprehensive framework. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) we find the health variable to suffer from...