We estimate the welfare consequences of local news broadcasting decisions in advertiser-funded television, a central question in media regulation. We model programming decisions as the outcome of a discrete game played by rival stations that compete for advertising revenue (which depends on...

We examine whether advertising increases household debt by studying the initial expansion of television in the 1950’s. Exploiting the idiosyncratic spread of television across markets, we use microdata from the Survey of Consumer Finances to test whether households with early access to...