We document the importance of local information in mass media for the political engagement of citizens and accountability of politicians. We study this in the context of Canada, where until 1958, competition in television markets was suppressed-Canadians received either public or private...

Gonzalez and Özak (2023) provide a direct and successful replication of Dickens (2022). Using a reconstructed version of the main independent variables from the same original sources, in addition to an updated version of the source data, the replicators confirm the main finding of the original...

A central argument for trade liberalization is that when the "gains from trade" are shared, countries see large gains in economic development. In this paper, I empirically evaluate this argument and assess the impact of elite capture on regional development. Africa provides a unique study ground...

A central argument for trade liberalization is that when the 'gains from trade' are shared, countries see large gains in economic development. In this paper, I empirically evaluate this argument and assess the impact of elite capture on regional development. Africa provides a unique study ground...

Dickens (2022) studies the role of trade on long-run inter-ethnic linguistic differences. He establishes that neighboring ethnolinguistic groups have smaller (lexicostatistical) linguistic distances when there is a larger agricultural productivity variation between them. Specifically, he...

This paper uses book translation data as a measure of idea flows to document a robust empirical relationship between these data and two measures of population relatedness: linguistic and genetic distance. I find a significant negative relationship between linguistic distance and book...