Santiago Cantillo-Cleves

Around the turn of the twentieth century, mass media expanded and politicians could increasingly reach voters without visiting them. This expansion may also have changed where campaign travel was most valuable, because a speech delivered in a well-connected place could reach a larger audience elsewhere. I study whether the expansion of news agencies, which collected news and supplied it by telegraph to subscribing newspapers, changed how U.S. presidential campaign speeches spread and where candidates chose to campaign between 1880 and 1916. Analyzing millions of newspaper articles, I construct data on campaign speeches, their coverage, and each newspaper's access to a news agency. When newspapers in both the county where a speech was delivered and another county subscribed to a news agency, the probability that the latter covered the speech increased by 1.7 percentage points, from a baseline of 0.35 percent, with larger increases at shorter distances. I use these estimates to construct each county's media reach, the expected number of outside voters reachable from a speech there. Exploiting the evolution of the news-agency network elsewhere while holding local access fixed, I find that a one-standard-deviation increase in media reach raised the probability that a county hosted a speech by 2.1 percentage points, from a baseline of 4.8 percent. Mass communication thus shaped both how political messages traveled and where politicians chose to deliver them.

High transportation costs in developing countries are often cited as a key hindrance to economic growth, and many billions of dollars have been invested in infrastructure in order to reduce these costs. If the transportation sector is uncompetitive, the benefits of infrastructure improvements may be attenuated or magnified depending on the pass-through of cost reductions to consumers and the extent to which lower trade costs foster competition in the transportation industry. In this paper, we develop a new spatial model featuring imperfect competition in the transportation sector that highlights a “triple curse of remoteness”: more remote locations face higher marginal costs for the same distance, face higher markups from less competition, and are served by worse transportation providers. Investments in infrastructure not only reduce physical costs of shipping, they also improve competition and induce better transportation firms to enter. We confirm the model predictions by examining large-scale infrastructure improvements in Colombia using a novel dataset of transactions between truck owners and shipping companies.

Regulators often impose price floors to protect producers from suspected market power by intermediaries. We present a toolkit for predicting, estimating, and explaining the effect of price floors on output and the distribution of welfare. We apply this toolkit to the Colombian road freight sector, taking advantage of rate floors that intended to protect carriers from low freight rates paid by intermediaries. We find that policymakers could have predicted the effect of price floors on quantities: a reduction in quantities for the routes and products for which rate floors were binding. After their implementation in 2017, rate floors benefited carriers but reduced total welfare by 12% of market revenue.

This paper documents three new stylized facts showing that truckers in Colombia frequently choose to make complex chains of shipments in a single trip before returning home. It then provides a new model of optimal trucker trip-chaining with a general geography that is consistent with these facts.

Governments increasingly restrict online pornography in an effort to reduce violence against women. The effect of such restrictions is theoretically ambiguous. Pornography may increase aggression through exposure to degrading or violent content, but it may also displace behaviors that create opportunities for violence. We study two large restrictions in two countries and find opposite effects. In the United States, state age-verification laws raised the cost of access, and induced the largest platforms to withdraw from the treated states. Exploiting the staggered adoption of the age-verification laws, as well as a comparison of adjacent counties across states, we find a decline of 1.3-1.4 (3%) monthly non-sexual assaults against female victims per 100,000 residents. In India, a 2018 nationwide order blocked 827 pornographic websites. We compare places with higher internet access before and after the policy, and instrument with a measure of how costly it was for a geographic location to access internet based on the number of lightnings in the area. In this context, we find that the policy ban increased annual rape incidents by 1.05 per 100,000 residents, while crimes not specifically directed at women do not rise. Both policies materially reduced access. Evidence on circumvention and substitution, offender age, and local age composition and household structure suggests that the balance between exposure and behavioral substitution differs across settings. Pornography restrictions therefore can have a differential effect on violence against women, and evaluating them requires attention to how users adjust to the regulations and to the local context.