Broadcasting Change: India’s Community Radio Policy and Women’s Empowerment
Job Market Paper
Unicredit Award 2025 — best paper on gender economics
FBK-IRVAPP Award 2025 — best article on the evaluation of public policies
ESEM Award 2024 — best applied paper
In poor countries, the interaction of early marriage, early motherhood, and low educational attainment disempowers women and limits their life opportunities. Even as countries grow richer, gender inequality is often sustained by social norms, thereby limiting welfare gains from women's empowerment. I investigate the use of media as a cheap and scalable policy to empower women. In 2006, India enacted a community radio policy that grants radio licenses to NGOs and educational institutions with the aim to foster local development. I collect original data on the content and coverage areas of all 250+ radio stations. I uncover women’s empowerment as a key theme through topic modeling and GPT-based analyses of radio show recordings. For identification, I exploit topography-driven variation in radio access and develop a novel econometric approach to deal with randomly displaced geolocated household data. The results show that women exposed to radio gain an additional 0.3 years of education and are 4.1pp (11%) more likely to obtain a secondary degree. In line with increased education, exposure reduces child marriages by 1.4pp (22%) and fertility of young women by around 10% while they are 11pp more likely to exhibit autonomy in household decisions. The findings demonstrate that community media can effectively address gender inequality.
MPI Discussion Paper
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Media:
Ideas for India (
in Hindi),
EconThatMatters
with
Antonio Ciccone
Despite rising stock markets in the United States and Europe from 2017 to 2024, we document that average daily stock market performance becomes negative when weighted by the amount of media coverage. We propose an explanation for this media negativity bias that does not rely on a bad-news bias in news selection. Instead, it rests on two observations: the media prioritize large market movements, positive or negative, and average daily stock market performance conditional on absolute changes above a threshold becomes negative as the threshold increases. We quantify the explanatory power of the proposed mechanism using data from Germany’s most-watched nightly news, which reports on the country's main stock index in a standardized format. Our analysis shows that selective reporting of large market movements accounts for about half the gap in average daily stock market performance between days with and without news coverage. We explain and quantify the link between media negativity bias and the negative skewness of aggregate stock returns.
ECONtribute Discussion Paper
Non-technical summary (German)
Non-technical summary (English)
Media:
VoxEU,
Finanz und Wirtschaft,
The Pioneer,
LSE Media Blog,
Mannheimer Morgen,
Finanzfluss,
Aktienrebell,
ESB
