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LIT-1319: Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals

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Properties5
StatusActive — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1040) in full, in the NBER working-paper version (revised July 2010); worth reading as a careful within-newspaper, within-presidency measure of how government advertising goes with front-page coverage of the government's corruption, with placebos on advertising channel and scandal type (THEORY-851). Read it knowing that it shows an association, that the version read reports 0.31 of a front page per standard deviation where the published abstract reports 0.23, that the early advertising series is reconstructed, and that one presidency carries much of the variation.
Version2
Tagssociety-and-governance, social-science
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1040 — Di Tella and Franceschelli — Government advertising and media coverage of corruption scandals
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-851 — In Argentina's four main national newspapers, April 1998 to December 2007, a newspaper's monthly front-page coverage of the federal government's corruption scandals was lower in months when it received more government advertising, within newspaper and month and within each newspaper-president pair (about 0.31 of a front page per standard deviation of advertising in the 2010 working paper); the association held for advertising placed through the presidency's agency and not for autonomous agencies, and not for scandals of non-political actors

Graph View

Di Tella, R. & Franceschelli, I. (2011). Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3(4): 119–151. doi:10.1257/app.3.4.119. Earlier: NBER Working Paper 15402 (October 2009), doi:10.3386/w15402.

Read 2026-10-21 in full, in the NBER working-paper version (NOTE-1040). The association is held as THEORY-851.

Why this is here

A21’s empirical illustration of an evaluator made dependent on the evaluated: “This is evidence of an association, not by itself proof of a particular covert intent.” R5 noted it would give CASE-123 a documented variant. Bears on CLAIM-404.

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