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...

This report contains an overview of the relevant economic research literature on the digital transformation of news markets and the impact on the quality of news. It compares various definitions of fake news, including false news and other types of disinformation and finds that there is no...

This paper examines the role of local TV market structure in US congressional politics, exploiting variation in the overlaps of political markets and TV markets. Local TV stations are hypothesized to report relatively more per US House representative in less populous markets (where the number of...

There is growing evidence in the finance literature that media coverage can influence security pricing by facilitating news dissemination and reducing informational frictions even if it does not provide new information. This study examines the role of media coverage in the well-known foreign...

In this study, we examine whether firms that act more socially responsible receive more favorable media coverage, and we consider whether firms use CSR to actively manage their media image. We focus on all news stories about a firm, not just those that report on specific CSR initiatives, and...

Can media coverage of shooters encourage future mass shootings? We explore the link between the day-to-day prime time television news coverage of shootings on ABC World News Tonight and subsequent mass shootings in the US from January 1, 2013 to June 23, 2016. To circumvent latent endogeneity...

We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 “minaret ban” referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with...

We examine whether media coverage influences firms' debt financing and, more importantly, the channels through which it occurs. We find that more media coverage significantly reduces firms' reliance on bank loans while increasing their nonbank debt financing. This effect is concentrated among...

Using news articles covering firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, we find that publicized CSR activities are positively associated with shareholder value and improved future operating performance. Furthermore, we find that media coverage on CSR engagements with local impact...