The growing literature on economic development and more so on new institutional economics, has unanimously agreed on the crucial role of different types of institutions on economic development. In the recent decade, economists have been stressing the role of a particular type of institution – the institution of media. Media acts as an anchor in many facets of a society and caters to its best interests – upholding the party in rule or exposing its vices, bringing out the positives and negatives of the industry, making people’s voices audible to the decision makers and most importantly, spreading and divulging economic information, curbing corruption and mitigating socio-political instability. In other words it acts as an important complement to democracy and governance. In this workshop, we will get introduced to the economics (and social science) literature on media, the data sources and critical research questions addressed. At the same time, we will talk about the challenges associated with research on media in terms of data and econometric models.

Reference Paper

1. Media Freedom, Political Instability and Economic Growth ( 2011), Dutta Nabamita, Sudeshna Pal and Sanjukta Roy, Working Paper

Other Readings

2. Djankov, Simeon, Caralee McLiesh, Tatiana Nenova, and Andrei Shleifer (2003), “Who Owns the Media?,” Journal of Law and Economics, 46, 341-382
   http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=267386
3. Brunetti, Aymo and Beatrice Weder (2003), “A Free Press is Bad News for Corruption”, Journal of Public Economics, 87(7-8), 1801-1824.