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The political economy of lockdown: Does free media matter?()

This paper studies the role of free media in how governments and the public responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. We first document the presence of policy and behavioural responsiveness during the early phase of the pandemic. Using a panel data of daily COVID-19 deaths, lockdown policies, and mobility...

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Autores principales: Besley, Timothy, Dray, Sacha
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9886394/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36743518
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2023.102361
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author Besley, Timothy
Dray, Sacha
author_facet Besley, Timothy
Dray, Sacha
author_sort Besley, Timothy
collection PubMed
description This paper studies the role of free media in how governments and the public responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. We first document the presence of policy and behavioural responsiveness during the early phase of the pandemic. Using a panel data of daily COVID-19 deaths, lockdown policies, and mobility changes in 155 countries, we find that governments were more likely to impose a lockdown, and citizens to reduce their mobility, as the initial number of deaths increased. To measure the role of media freedom on responsiveness given endogeneity in death reporting, we simulate deaths from a calibrated SEIR model as an instrument for reported deaths. Using this approach, we find evidence that the presence of free media mattered for the timing of early responses to COVID-19. Responsiveness to deaths was limited to citizens in free-media countries, and accounted for 40% of the difference in lockdown decision and mobility changes between free-media and censored-media countries. In support of the role of free media, we show that differences in responsiveness are not explained by a range of other country characteristics such as the level of income, education or democracy. We also find evidence that citizens with access to free media were better informed about the pandemic and had more responsive levels of online searches about COVID-19, supporting the view that free media served to inform the public on the risks of COVID-19.
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spelling pubmed-98863942023-01-31 The political economy of lockdown: Does free media matter?() Besley, Timothy Dray, Sacha Eur J Polit Econ Article This paper studies the role of free media in how governments and the public responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. We first document the presence of policy and behavioural responsiveness during the early phase of the pandemic. Using a panel data of daily COVID-19 deaths, lockdown policies, and mobility changes in 155 countries, we find that governments were more likely to impose a lockdown, and citizens to reduce their mobility, as the initial number of deaths increased. To measure the role of media freedom on responsiveness given endogeneity in death reporting, we simulate deaths from a calibrated SEIR model as an instrument for reported deaths. Using this approach, we find evidence that the presence of free media mattered for the timing of early responses to COVID-19. Responsiveness to deaths was limited to citizens in free-media countries, and accounted for 40% of the difference in lockdown decision and mobility changes between free-media and censored-media countries. In support of the role of free media, we show that differences in responsiveness are not explained by a range of other country characteristics such as the level of income, education or democracy. We also find evidence that citizens with access to free media were better informed about the pandemic and had more responsive levels of online searches about COVID-19, supporting the view that free media served to inform the public on the risks of COVID-19. The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. 2023-06 2023-01-31 /pmc/articles/PMC9886394/ /pubmed/36743518 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2023.102361 Text en © 2023 The Author(s) Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Besley, Timothy
Dray, Sacha
The political economy of lockdown: Does free media matter?()
title The political economy of lockdown: Does free media matter?()
title_full The political economy of lockdown: Does free media matter?()
title_fullStr The political economy of lockdown: Does free media matter?()
title_full_unstemmed The political economy of lockdown: Does free media matter?()
title_short The political economy of lockdown: Does free media matter?()
title_sort political economy of lockdown: does free media matter?()
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9886394/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36743518
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2023.102361
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