Can Government-Controlled Media Cause Social Change? Television and Fertility in India *

Abstract Does exposure to government-controlled media shape social attitudes and behaviors? Governments routinely enlist public broadcasting to advance progressive social change. However, the efficacy of so-called "developmental communications" is unclear. Modernization theorists contend that the media serve as an important instrument of persuasion in poor countries-especially among certain population groups. Yet, where institutionalization is weak, government-controlled outlets are often dominated by ruling-party propaganda, which may induce distrust in the media and its messaging campaigns. To adjudicate which of these propositions holds sway, we investigate television's impact on fertility preferences and behaviors in India. Exploiting unique data, as well as plausibly exogenous variation in TV ownership due to electromagnetic wave refraction, we show that exposure to India's monopolistic state broadcaster, Doordarshan, caused women to desire fewer children-especially fewer girls-while increasing family planning discussions and contraceptive use. The results demonstrate that even biased state media can engender far-reaching societal transformation. * We than

Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth

Recent research yields widely divergent estimates of the cross-country relationship between foreign aid receipts and economic growth. We re-analyse data from the three most influential published aid-growth studies, strictly conserving their regression specifications, with sensible assumptions about the timing of aid effects and without questionable instruments. All three research designs show that increases in aid have been followed on average by increases in investment and growth. The most plausible explanation is that aid causes some degree of growth in recipient countries, although the magnitude of this relationship is modest, varies greatly across recipients and diminishes at high levels of aid. Economists have spent decades debating, without resolution, the cross-country relationship between foreign aid receipts and economic growth. Some find that aid robustly causes positive economic growth on average. Others cannot distinguish the average effect from zero. Still others find an effect only in certain countries, such as those with good policies or governance. Wearied readers of this literature would be right to wonder what produces diverse findings from apparently the same aid and growth data. Here, we show that two traits of previous research help to explain why different studies reach different conclusions. Both traits relate to how these studies treat the timing of causal relationships between aid and growth. First, the most cited research has focused on measuring the effect of aggregate aid on contemporaneous growth, while many aid-funded projects can take a long time to influence growth. Funding for a new road might affect economic activity in short order, funding for a vaccination campaign might only affect growth decades later and humanitarian assistance may never affect growth. Second, because current growth is likely to affect current aid, these studies require a strategy to disentangle correlation from causation. They have tended to rely on instrumental variables but the instruments that have been used are of questionable validity and strength. When these issues are addressed, the divergence in empirical findings is greatly reduced. We show this by stepwise altering the research design of the three most influential papers in the aid and growth literature. We hold all else constant: we begin b

India National and State Election Dataset

This database contains detailed candidate-level data for elections to the lower houses of India's national and state legislatures, i.e., the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabhas. The data span 1977-2015, with each row representing a candidate that ran for office in that state-year

Replication Data for: Nativism and Economic Integration Across the Developing World, 2018, Cambridge University Press.

Migration and nativism are explosive issues in Europe and North America. Less well-known is the tumult that soaring migration is creating in the politics of developing countries. The key difference between anti-migrant politics in developed and developing countries is that domestic migration - not international migration - is the likely focus of nativist politics in poorer countries. Nativists take up the cause of sub-national groups, vilifying other regions and groups within the country as sources of migration. Since the 1970s, the majority of less-developed countries have adopted policies that aim to limit internal migration. This Element marshals evidence from around the world to explore the colliding trends of internal migration and nativism. Subnational migration is associated with a boom in nativist politics. Pro-native public policy and anti-migrant riots are both more likely when internal migration surges. Political decentralization strengthens subnational politicians' incentives and ability to define and cater to nativists

Replication Data for: Local Embeddedness and Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from India

Replication data and code for JoP article