TY  - JOUR
AU  - Tella,Rafael Di
AU  - Franceschelli,Ignacio
TI  - Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15402
PY  - 2009
Y2  - October 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15402
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15402.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Rafael Di Tella
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field Rd
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617/495-6000
E-Mail: rditella@hbs.edu

Ignacio Franceschelli
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
E-Mail: nacho@northwestern.edu
AB  - We construct measures of the extent to which the 4 main newspapers in Argentina report government corruption in their front page during the period 1998-2007 and correlate them with the extent to which each newspaper is a recipient of government advertising. The correlation is negative. The size is considerable: a one standard deviation increase in monthly government advertising (0.26 million pesos of 2000) is associated with a reduction in the coverage of the government’s corruption scandals by 0.31 of a front page per month, or 25% of a standard deviation in our measure of coverage. The results are robust to the inclusion of newspaper, month, newspaper*president and individual-corruption scandal fixed effects as well as newspaper*president specific time trends. 
ER  -