News consumption is moving online. If this move fundamentally changes how news is produced and consumed it will have important ramifications for politics. In this chapter we formulate a model of the supply and demand of news online that is motivated by descriptive features of online news...

Using data from 1869 to 1928, we estimate the effect of party control of state governments on the entry, exit, circulation, prices, number of pages, and content of Republican and Democratic daily newspapers. We exploit changes over time in party control of the governorship and state legislatures...

We study the competitive forces that shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand,...

We review the theoretical literature on market determinants of media bias. We present a theoretical framework that organizes many key themes in the literature, and discuss substantive lessons.

Empirical papers in economics often describe heuristically how their estimates depend on intuitive features of the data. We propose two quantitative measures of this relationship that can be computed at negligible cost even for complex models. We show that our measures can be informative about...

We estimate the effect of information and expertise on consumers’ willingness to pay for national brands in physically homogeneous product categories. In a detailed case study of headache remedies we find that more informed or expert consumers are less likely to pay extra to buy national...

We construct a new index of media slant that measures whether a news outlet.s language is more similar to that of a congressional Republican or Democrat. We apply the measure to study the market forces that determine political con- tent in the news. We estimate a model of newspaper demand that...

A Bayesian consumer who is uncertain about the quality of an information source will infer that the source is of higher quality when its reports conform to the consumer's prior expectations. We use this fact to build a model of media bias in which firms slant their reports toward the prior...

We use heterogeneity in the timing of television's introduction to different local markets to identify the effect of preschool television exposure on standardized test scores later in life. Our preferred point estimate indicates that an additional year of preschool television exposure raises...