In this hybrid research seminar on Thursday May 21, 2026 at 12:00 pm by Professor Guilhem Cassan— will present her research titled "Political Determinants of the News Market: Novel Data and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from India ".
Abstract:
Information conveyed through news media influences political behavior. But to what extent are media markets themselves shaped by political determinants? We build a novel panel dataset of newspaper markets in India from 2002 to 2017 to measure the impact of changes in apportionment on the development of the news industry over time. We exploit the announcement of an exogenous change in the boundaries of electoral constituencies (the 2008 delimitation) to causally identify the relationship between the (future) apportionment of news markets and the change in the number and circulation of newspapers. Using an event-study model and a staggered Difference-in-Differences approach, we show that markets that faced an increase in representation experienced a significant rise in both circulation and the number of titles per capita. News and current affairs newspapers respond more to this increase. Furthermore, we document various dimensions of heterogeneity and show in particular that the magnitude of the estimated effects is larger in places with a relatively low level of newspaper and political competition prior to the 2008 delimitation.
The Teams link to join the seminar online can be found here. This event is open to the public; all those interested in this topic are very welcome to attend. After the presentation there will be time for questions and discussion.
For any queries related to our MILE-SBE Seminar Series, please contact Roland Bouillot, by sending an email to mile-seminar-sbe@maastrichtuniversity.nl.