This paper presents an empirical test for the hypothesis that US news coverage of al-Qaeda causes al-Qaeda attacks. To isolate causality, disaster deaths worldwide provide an instrumental variable crowding out al-Qaeda coverage. Studying daily al-Qaeda coverage by CNN, NBC, CBS, and Fox News, as...

In a large-scale online experiment with U.S. Democrats, we examine how the demand for a newsletter about an economic relief plan changes when the newsletter content is fact-checked. We first document an overall muted demand for fact-checking when the newsletter features stories from an...

We present a new measure for the political position of news outlets based on politicians' selective sharing of news items. Politicians predominantly share news items that are in line with their political position, hence, one can infer the political position of news outlets from the politicians'...

Using a unique dataset of 22.5 million news articles from the Dow Jones Newswires Archive, we perform an in depth real-time out-of-sample forecasting comparison study with one of the most widely used data sets in the newer forecasting literature, namely the FRED-MD dataset. Focusing on U.S. GDP,...

We construct a Hotelling-type model of two media providers, each of whom can issue fake and/or real news and each of whom can invest in the debunking of their rival's fake news. The model assumes that consumers have an innate preference for one provider or the other and value real news. However,...

This study uses an original state-level data set to investigate whether press coverage on trials for tax evasion by celebrities affects the likelihood that other tax payers participate in Germany's tax amnesty program. To identify the causal effect, we use exogenous variation in the reporting,...

Using the variation in national television news of four major member states in the Eurozone, we find causal effects of coverage of high-frequency identified monetary policy announcements on households' inflation expectations in an event study and a generalized Difference-in-Differences approach...

We investigate the welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination by a two-sided platform that enables interaction between buyers and sellers. Sellers are heterogenous with respect to their per-interaction benefit, and, under price discrimination, the platform can condition its fee on...

Flawed research can be harmful both within and outside of academia. Even when published research has been retracted and refuted by the scientific community, it may continue to be a source of misinformation. The media can play an important role in drawing broader attention to research, but may...

Recent decades have seen major changes to the local media environment in the United States, with the absorption of many formerly independent local TV stations into conglomerates. Using a comprehensive dataset of acquisitions, we examine the effects of ownership by the three largest television...