In democracies voters rely on media outlets to learn about politically salient issues. This raises an important question: how strongly can media affect public perceptions? This paper uses a natural experiment - the staggered introduction of the Digital TV signal in Italy - to measure the effect...

Crime perception has increased in Peru in recent years, as in other developing and developed countries, in spite of the reduction in crime victimization figures. Our hypothesis is that the news industry is in part responsible for such developments. Using a novel database of written news, we...

In democracies voters rely on media outlets to learn about politically salient issues. This raises an important question: how strongly can media affect public perceptions? This paper uses a natural experiment – the staggered introduction of the Digital TV signal in Italy – to measure the...

Exposure to conservative news causes judges to impose harsher criminal sentences. Our evidence comes from an instrumental variables analysis, where randomness in television channel positioning across localities induces exogenous variation in exposure to Fox News Channel. These treatment data on...

A case for the de-criminalization of graffiti is made, based on the existence of an unjust government, and predicated on private property rights. A distinction is made between artistic trespass, or vandalism, on the one hand, which we claim can be undertaken only on private property, and, on the...

This paper studies the language used in television news broadcasts to describe police killings in the United States from 2013-19. We begin by documenting that the media is significantly more likely to use several language structures - e.g., passive voice, nominalization, intransitive verbs -...

Why do people who normally refrain from committing illegalities become digital pirates? In this paper we use a theoretical model of digital piracy combined with a game-theoretic mechanism of social norm formation to argue that no social stigma is attached to digital piracy because the latter has...

In the information age, major negative events can spread quickly and affect investor perceptions and decisions. Selecting major violent crime events in China, we investigate the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in mitigating regional negative public sentiment. We find that the firms...

Using enforcements of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, we test the hypothesis that socially responsible (ESG) firms receive lower sanctions from prosecutors. Since virtually all cases are settled by bargaining, we estimate sanction specifications derived from a Nash Bargaining model. To...