FEATURED MEDIA PLAYLIST
PHOTO GALLERY
The media world has been upended many times by technological progress, but digital media is changing the ways we produce, access, share, and filter information faster than ever before. Understanding the changing media environment and its impact on our society and political climate is complex, requiring analysis from multiple viewpoints.
The second conference on media and communications brought together scholars across fields including political economy, industrial organization, and economic theory to examine critical questions of how the media shapes our lives today.
Program
Thursday, November 5
Death and the Media
University of California, Los Angeles
As infectious disease in the US and western Europe declined dramatically over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, how did the media report changing public health risk? Matthew E. Kahn reports that news coverage was more responsive to unexpected increases in death rates than to unexpected decreases in death rates, suggesting that consumers find bad news more useful than good news.
Newspapers in Times of Low Advertising Revenues
Sciences Po
Julia Cagé investigates the determinants of second-degree price discrimination in the two-sided markets that newspapers operate under, serving both readers and advertisers.
News-Implied Volatility and Disaster Concerns
Washington University in St. Louis Olin Business School
Asaf Manela presents a text-based measure of uncertainty starting in 1890 using a machine learning technique applied to front-page articles of the Wall Street Journal. He argues that news implied volatility (NVIX) predicts high future returns in normal times, and rises just before transitions into economic disasters.
Friday, November 6
Cottage Cheese Boycott
Northwestern University
Igal Hendel examines a boycott on cottage cheese that was organized in Israel in the summer of 2011 following a steep increase in prices after price controls were lifted in 2006. Prices dropped and remained low for three years after the boycott. Why?
Curriculum and Ideology
Ludwig-Maximilians Universitåt München
University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Paola Sapienza
Davide Cantoni presents an examination of the causal effect of school curricula on students’ political attitudes, exploiting a major textbook reform in China between 2004 and 2010.
Publicizing Malfeasance: When Media Facilitates Electoral Accountability in Mexico
Harvard University
James M. Snyder Jr. presented work estimating the effect of broadcast media outlets revealing information about incumbent performance on electoral accountability in Mexico. He and his coauthors’ findings thus indicate that electoral accountability requires that the media market structure provides media stations with incentives to supply politically-relevant information to their audiences.
Attack When the World is Not Watching? International Media and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Sciences Po and UPF
Ruben Durante presents evidence that policy makers may strategically time unpopular measures – including military action – to coincide with other newsworthy events that distract the media and the public. Combining daily data on attacks on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with data on the content of evening news for top U.S. TV networks, he argues that Israeli attacks are more likely to be carried out when U.S. news are expected to be dominated by important (non-Israel-or-Palestine related) events on the following day.
Media Power
Columbia Business School
Andrea Prat defines the power of a media organization as its ability to induce voters to make electoral decisions they would not make if reporting were unbiased, and proposes a measure of that power.