Final Report Summary - MEDIA AND POLICY (The impact of mass media on public policy)
The project has been able to identify effects of mass media on voter information, voter turnout, the effort and selection of politicians and on government policy in the case of U.S. Congressional elections. We have also identified effects of mass media on the length of criminal sentencing of U.S. judges. To achieve this, methods were developed to identify the causal effect of mass media, driven by the coincidental match between political markets and congressional districts. This is a novel approach to identifying the causal effect of media, which is now being used in subsequent studies. We have measured the bias in Chinese newspapers, after developing a method to this aim and after collecting a novel newspaper directory and newspaper content data. We have also been able to identify the effect of the Chinese social media "Sina Weibo" on drug quality. This was achieved using a standard difference-in-difference regression technique. The project results have been communicated through publications in leading economics journals (Snyder and Strömber, 2010, Lim, Snyder and Strömberg, 2014, Qin, Strömberg and Wu, 2013, 2015) and survey articles (Prat and Strömberg, 2013, Strömberg (2015a, 2015b)).