Essays on political corruption and media freedom

This dissertation focuses on the role of the media in the provision of information that citizens can use to monitor the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats.;The first chapter presents a formal model of electoral control that takes into account campaign finance and personal consumption as motives for corruption, and analyzes the role of the press in helping voters hold politicians accountable. The theoretical model predicts that the corruption-reducing effect of a free press is conditional on the proportion of voters affected by campaign messages. The chapter also provides cross-country empirical support for this prediction.;The second chapter presents a general theoretical framework to understand when the media are able and willing to provide information regarding political malfeasance. Competition among a generic number of publishers and newspapers is modeled. Politicians can affect media content in two ways: through legal sanctions against editors, or through pressure on publishers. If a politician sues a journalist, the case is decided by a court that might be more or less independent from the politician. Publishers vary in the relative weights they assign to market profits and to rewards derived from loyalty to politicians. Equilibria in which information is revealed or remains undisclosed are characterized. The economic and legal preconditions for a well-functioning media market are analyzed.;The third chapter shows empirically how legal regulation of speech affects how newspapers report sensitive political information. Exploiting the variation in the legal restrictions to speech across states in a federal country, the reduction in coverage of political and bureaucratic corruption associated with regulation of speech is estimated, using an original dataset based on the content analysis of local newspapers in Mexico. Many articles on corruption are "missing" in newspapers from states with more punitive defamation law. Instrumental variable models---in which the severity of criminal statutes for unrelated offenses is used as an instrument---estimate the causal effect of regulation. Restrictions to media freedom significantly reduce coverage of corruption.