YSI – Economic History Graduate Webinar: Lena Song

Lena Song, PhD candidate from NYU, will present her work: *The Role of Culture and Competition in Media Diversity: Historical Evidence from U.S. Radio Stations *

If you wish to attend, please register for the entire series here: https://forms.gle/LtqDgzoDtAojZg1S8

Attendees will receive by email on Wednesday morning the link to join the webinar.

Abstract:
This paper examines the role racial discrimination, technical change and competition play in programme choice of radio stations in the post-war Jim Crow era. I construct a novel, comprehensive dataset of all commercial radio stations across the U.S. from 1946 to 1958, including station-level financial information and black programming hours. This provides a new panel measure of racial diversity in the media across the country. By comparing profitability of black and other radio stations, I address the question whether racial discrimination by firms led to underprovision of content for minorities. Based on existing work on product positioning, I build a theoretical framework to model programming choice in radio market to back out a measure of firm owner discrimination. Finally, I test if competitive pressure from the introduction of TV reduces media market discrimination.