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Investigative reporting generates new information about important issues that someone is trying to keep secret. Impacts of this journalism can be high. Yet the costs of discovering and telling these stories may also be significant. Democracy's Detectives uses economic theories of information to explain both how institutions breakdown in predictable ways and how journalists find and reveal which programs, products, and people go astray. The book analyzes the market for investigative reporting by examining more than 12,000 prize competition entries from 1979 to 2010 in the annual awards contest of Investigative Reporters and Editors. The results show what these investigative works in the United States uncovered and their impacts, and how the investigations were conducted and financially supported. Case studies of several investigative series demonstrate that each dollar invested in a story can yield hundreds of dollars in policy benefits. Examining the work of a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter shows how a single journalist over four decades generated more than 150 investigations that led to changes, including the passage of thirty-one state laws. Many valuable accountability stories go untold because media outlets bear the costs of reporting while the benefits spillover onto those who don't read or watch these investigations. Computational journalism may improve the economics of investigative reporting in two ways: lowering the cost of finding stories through better use of data and algorithms, and telling stories in more personalized and engaging ways. While breakdowns in institutions are inevitable, the combination of computation and journalism offers an expanded set of people new ways to hold those in power accountable and serve as democracy's detectives.--

Enrolling over 30 million acres, the U.S. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is the largest conservation program in the United States. Under the guidelines of the CRP, the federal government pays farmers to stop farming their land in the hopes of achieving a variety of conservation goals, including the reduction of soil erosion, improvement of water quality, and creation of wildlife habitat. In Conserving Data, James T. Hamilton explores the role of information in the policy cycle as it relates to the CRP. The author asks how the creation and distribution of information about what is going on

"If it bleeds, it leads." The phrase captures television news directors' famed preference for opening newscasts with the most violent stories they can find. And what is true for news is often true for entertainment programming, where violence is used as a product to attract both viewers and sponsors. In this book, James Hamilton presents the first major theoretical and empirical examination of the market for television violence. Hamilton approaches television violence in the same way that other economists approach the problem of pollution: that is, as an example of market failure. He argues that television violence, like pollution, generates negative externalities, defined as costs borne by others than those involved in the production activity. Broadcasters seeking to attract viewers may not fully bear the costs to society of their violent programming, if those costs include such factors as increased levels of aggression and crime in society. Hamilton goes on to say that the comparison to pollution remains relevant when considering how to deal with the problem. Approaches devised to control violent programming, such as restricting it to certain times and rating programs according to the violence they contain, have parallels in zoning and education policies designed to protect the environment. Hamilton examines in detail the microstructure of incentives that operate at every level of television broadcasting, from programming and advertising to viewer behavior, so that remedies can be devised to reduce violent programming without restricting broadcasters' right to compete

"This paper develops a framework for inferring common Markov-switching components in a panel data set with large cross-section and time-series dimensions. We apply the framework to studying similarities and differences across U.S. states in the timing of business cycles. We hypothesize that there exists a small number of cluster designations, with individual states in a given cluster sharing certain business cycle characteristics. We find that although oil-producing and agricultural states can sometimes experience a separate recession from the rest of the United States, for the most part, differences across states appear to be a matter of timing, with some states entering recession or recovering before others"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site