We document strikingly similar gender differences in financial literacy across countries. When asked to answer questions that measure knowledge of basic financial concepts, women are less likely than men to answer correctly and more likely to indicate that they do not know the answer. In...

This paper investigates the relationship between media bias and the influence of the media on voting in the context of newspaper endorsements. We first develop a simple econometric model in which voters choose candidates under uncertainty and rely on endorsements from better informed sources....

In this paper we estimate the impact of press coverage on citizen knowledge, politicians' actions, and policy. We find that a poor fit between newspaper markets and political districts reduces press coverage of politics. We use variation in this fit due to redistricting to identify the effects...

Many important economic questions hinge on the extent to which new goods either crowd out or complement consumption of existing products. Recent methods for studying new goods are based on demand models that rule out complementarity by assumption, so their applicability to these questions has...

We introduce a new text-mining methodology that extracts sentiment information from news articles to predict asset returns. Unlike more common sentiment scores used for stock return prediction (e.g., those sold by commercial vendors or built with dictionary-based methods), our supervised...

We create a newspaper-based Equity Market Volatility (EMV) tracker that moves with the VIX and with the realized volatility of returns on the S&P 500. Parsing the underlying text, we find that 72 percent of EMV articles discuss the Macroeconomic Outlook, and 44 percent discuss Commodity Markets....

In the late 19th Century, cities in Western Europe and the United States suffered from high levels of infectious disease. Over a 40 year period, there was a dramatic decline in infectious disease deaths in cities. As such objective progress in urban quality of life took place, how did the media...

We estimate the effect of local media outlets on political accountability in Mexico, focusing on malfeasance by municipal mayors. We study federal grants earmarked for infrastructure projects targeting the poor, and leverage two sources of plausibly exogenous variation. First, we exploit...

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and...

We construct a new index of media slant that measures whether a news outlet.s language is more similar to that of a congressional Republican or Democrat. We apply the measure to study the market forces that determine political con- tent in the news. We estimate a model of newspaper demand that...