Contributions published at Development and Emerging Markets (David Yanagizawa-Drott)

This chapter outlines the fundamental empirical challenges when studying media effects on conflict and discusses some recent methodological advances designed to overcome them. The evidence in this emerging literature indicates that mass media can be an effective tool for political elites to orchestrate mass violence. Both direct and indirect persuasion matter. The emerging evidence indicates that direct persuasion is stronger when propaganda targeting ethnic minorities is aligned with political predispositions of the ethnic majority, and indirect persuasion may occur from coordination of violence and from spillovers arising from social interactions.

We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of daily fasting due to the interaction between the rotating Islamic calendar and a country’s latitude. We report two key, quantitatively meaningful results: (i) longer Ramadan fasting has a negative effect on output growth in Muslim countries, and (ii) it increases subjective well-being among Muslims. We find evidence that these patterns are consistent with a standard club good explanation for the emergence of costly religious practices: increased strictness of fasting screens out the less committed members, while the more committed respond with an increase in their relative levels of participation. Together, our results underscore that religious practices can affect individual behavior and beliefs in ways that have negative implications for economic performance, but that nevertheless increase subjective well-being among followers.

This article investigates the role of mass media in times of conflict and state-sponsored mass violence against civilians. We use a unique village-level data set from the Rwandan genocide to estimate the impact of a popular radio station that encouraged violence against the Tutsi minority population. The results show that the broadcasts had a significant effect on participation in killings by both militia groups and ordinary civilians. An estimated 51,000 perpetrators, or approximately 10% of the overall violence, can be attributed to the station. The broadcasts increased militia violence not only directly by influencing behavior in villages with radio reception but also indirectly by increasing participation in neighboring villages. In fact, spillovers are estimated to have caused more militia violence than the direct effects. Thus, the article provides evidence that mass media can affect participation in violence directly due to exposure and indirectly due to social interactions.

This chapter discusses whether education limits or exacerbates the effects of statesponsored propaganda on political violence. It provides evidence for the hypothesis that basic education can limit the effectiveness of propaganda by increasing access to alternative media sources. It builds on the case study of the Rwandan genocide in work done by Yanagizawa-Drott (2011), and shows that the propaganda disseminated by the “hate radio” station RTLM did not affect participation in violence in villages where education levels, as measured by literacy rates, were relatively high. A discussion of the potential underlying mechanisms driving the results is presented. The methodological challenges of identifying causal effects of mass media and propaganda are also described, including recent innovations using statistical methods that may be used to overcome those challenges.

This paper examines whether social interactions and cultural practices affect political views and behavior in society. We investigate the issue by documenting a major social and cultural event at different stages in life: the Fourth of July celebrations in the United States during the 20th century. Using absence of rainfall as a proxy for participation in the event, we find that days without rain on Fourth of July in childhood shift adult views and voting in favor of the Republicans and increase turnout in presidential elections. The effects we estimate are highly persistent throughout life and originate in early age. Rain-free Fourth of Julys experienced as an adult also make it more likely that people identify as Republicans, but the effect depreciates substantially after a few years. Taken together, the evidence suggests that political views and behavior derive from social and cultural experience in early childhood, and that Fourth of July shapes the political landscape in the Unites States.

Is social capital a substitute or a complement to formal institutions for achieving economic growth? A number of recent micro studies suggest that interpersonal trust has its greatest impact on economic performance when court institutions are relatively weak. The conventional wisdom from most macro studies, however, is that social capital is unconditionally good for growth. On the basis of the micro evidence, we outline an investment game between a producer and a lender in an incomplete-contracts setting. A key insight is that social capital will have the greatest effect on the total surplus from the game at lower levels of institutional strength and that the effect of social capital vanishes when institutions are very strong. When we bring this prediction to an empirical cross-country growth regression, it is shown that the marginal effect of social capital (in the form of interpersonal trust) decreases with institutional strength. Our results imply that a one standard deviation rise in social capital in weakly institutionalized Nigeria should increase economic growth by 1.8 percentage points, whereas the same increase in social capital only increases growth by 0.3 percentage points in strongly institutionalized Canada.