Just how much did hate radio fuel the Rwandan genocide? David Yanagizawa, an economics job market candidate from Stockholm University, uses Rwanda’s hilly topography to look at the effect of the Mille Collines “hate radio” on violence.
Not all villages are in line of sight of the two national transmitters. The effect of being so? When a village has full rather than zero radio coverage, civilian violence increased by 65 percent and organized violence by 77 percent.
See his many interesting papers here.
How does Yanagizawa respond to arguments of people like Scott Strauss (_The Order of Genocide_), who show that the genocide was much more a question of local level political power struggles than national-level propaganda?
Just saw his job market talk this afternoon, and it was quite good. He defended potential criticisms well and demonstrated a thorough understanding of the literature. The empirical part was certainly more polished than the theoretical section, but overall it was a good presentation.
It was very cool to better understand the topographic variation software he uses to get exogeneity. Given that he has some other interesting working papers as well, he seems to be a fairly strong candidate. So far, probably the best job market presentation we’ve had here this year (imo, anyway).