Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/193194 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 11900
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Can media coverage of shooters encourage future mass shootings? We explore the link between the day-to-day prime time television news coverage of shootings on ABC World News Tonight and subsequent mass shootings in the US from January 1, 2013 to June 23, 2016. To circumvent latent endogeneity concerns, we employ an instrumental variable strategy: worldwide disaster deaths provide an exogenous variation that systematically crowds out shooting-related coverage. Our findings consistently suggest a positive and statistically significant effect of coverage on the number of subsequent shootings, lasting for 4-10 days. At its mean, news coverage is suggested to cause approximately three mass shootings in the following week, which would explain 55 percent of all mass shootings in our sample. Results are qualitatively consistent when using (i) additional keywords to capture shooting-related news coverage, (ii) alternative definitions of mass shootings, (iii) the number of injured or killed people as the dependent variable, and (iv) an alternative, longer data source for mass shootings from 2006-2016.
Subjects: 
media effects
mass shootings
contagion hypothesis
instrumental variable estimation
JEL: 
C26
D91
F52
L82
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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