tailieunhanh - BOOK: The Power of TV: Cable Television and Women's Status in India

Reality TV is only one of the ways in which the visual images of surveillance cameras are circulated. It is institutional and often commercial, so usually individuals do not have an active role in producing it – except when it comes to some programs presenting ‘the funniest home videos’. Webcams are of a different order. Also many of them are institutional and commercial, but there is a huge amount of webcams installed by individuals, for other individuals, without any commercial tone. The webcam network can be conceptualised as a “grassroots telepresence project” (Campanella, 2004: 61). Indeed, from. | NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE POWER OF TV CABLE TELEVISION AND WOMEN S STATUS IN INDIA Robert Jensen Emily Oster Working Paper 13305 http papers w13305 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge MA 02138 August 2007 Matthew Gentzkow Larry Katz Steve Levitt Divya Mathur Ben Olken Andrei Shleifer Jesse Shapiro and participants in a seminar at the University of Chicago provided helpful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the author s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. 2007 by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster. All rights reserved. Short sections of text not to exceed two paragraphs may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit including notice is given to the source. The Power of TV Cable Television and Women s Status in India Robert Jensen and Emily Oster NBER Working Paper No. 13305 August 2007 JeL No. J13 J16 O12 O33 ABSTRACT Cable and satellite television have grown rapidly throughout the developing world. The availability of cable and satellite television exposes viewers to new information about the outside world which may affect individual attitudes and behaviors. This paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural India. Using a three-year individual-level panel dataset we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in women s status. We find significant increases in reported autonomy decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preference. We also find increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility primarily via increased birth spacing . The effects are large equivalent in some cases to about five years of education in the cross section and move gender attitudes of individuals in rural areas much closer to those in urban areas. We argue that the results are not driven by pre-existing differential .