| The dissertation contains four chapters that cover several areas within the field of Applied Microeconomics. The first two chapters study issues related to the Economics of Media from an Industrial Organization and a Political Economy perspective respectively. Meanwhile, the third chapter is in the area of Labor Economics and the fourth chapter in the area of Political Economy.;In the first chapter I study the impact of the internet on how news organizations invest in original reporting. I analyze the reporting of 727,038 events in the largest print and online newspapers in Argentina over a twelve-year period. The results show that the internet, by allowing newspapers to post more frequently, has reduced the readership gain formerly associated with being the first news outlet to report an event. The decrease in the incentive newspapers have to invest in news gathering is reflected in an increase in the time outlets take to discover events after they occur. Nevertheless, the internet has also permitted newspapers to update their editions faster, reducing the gap between events being discovered and being published. Overall, the latter effect dominates, therefore the results indicate the internet has improved the coverage of news. In the second chapter I construct with Rafael Di Tella (Harvard) measures of the extent to which the four main newspapers in Argentina report government corruption in their front page during the period 1998-2007 and correlate them with government advertising. The correlation is negative. The size is considerable: a one standard deviation increase in monthly government advertising is associated with a reduction in the coverage of the government's corruption scandals by 0.23 of a front page per month, or 18 percent of a standard deviation in 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. A later version of the chapter was published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2011), 3(4), 119--151.;In the third chapter I study with Sebastian Galiani (Washington University in Saint Louis) and Eduardo Gulmez (Universidad de San Andres) the effect over productivity of a switch in the incentive scheme in two manufacturing plants in Argentina. Existing literature has mainly focused on analyses of the overall effect of a change in the incentive scheme. Lazear (2000), for example, estimates the average increase in productivity after a firm switches from an hourly-wage scheme to a piece-rate plus basic-wage scheme. His paper does not, however, account for the fact that many workers remained within the basic-wage range after the change was made in the incentive scheme. In this chapter we explore how the incentive effect might have been different for those workers seeking the basic wage, and those workers seeking the piece-rate component of the wage. Interestingly, the change in productivity is approximately the same in percentage terms for both types of workers. A later version of the chapter was published in Labour Economics (2010), 17(2), 317--322.;Finally, in the fourth chapter I assess with Lucas Ronconi (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella) the effect of workfare policy on social movement mobilizations in Argentina. The results suggest that an increase in workfare fueled the development of insurgency, and that ignoring simultaneity between workfare policy and protests leads to large biases. A later version of the chapter was published in Economics Letters (2009), 105(3), 315--317. |
