Essays on media and development

Abstract

This dissertation examines the social and political impact of mass media and digital technologies. The first chapter explores the potential of the media to change people’s attitudes and behavior. Employing a manually collected dataset of local radio stations, I study how communist institutions affect gender norms and focus on radio propaganda in China. I exploit exogenous geographic variation in radio wave penetration and find that exposure to communist propaganda improved gender equality in education and the status of women, although these effects did not persist. Analysis of the individual-level survey data reveals that persuasion affected behavior by updating listeners’ beliefs and changing their gender attitudes. The second chapter studies how the shock of digital technology affects news quality. My co-author and I focus on the impact of Weibo, China’s largest micro-blogging platform, on news production. Based on millions of news articles, we create novel measures of news quality in traditional newspapers. To identify the causal impact of the platform shock, we exploit quasi-random geographic variation in social media penetration based on information about the early stages of Weibo’s development. We find that penetration of Weibo significantly reduced newspapers’ production of politically biased content, while prompting them to produce more original and diverse reports. The findings suggest that social media can be constructive in influencing the information environment and in expanding the critical information people can get from traditional media outlets.