efforts to encourage households to take advantage of government health products seem to lead to the diversion of those products from potentially free into paid markets.

An additional contribution of this study is to increase our understanding of the mechanisms through which media access influences policy outcomes. All theories agree that media access matters because it increases the transmission of relevant information to households, better enabling them to hold government accountable or to make appropriate decisions regarding health, education or simply the take-up of government policies. With the exception of research by Snyder and Strömberg (2011) using US data, earlier researchers could not confirm both that media actually broadcast relevant information and that media affected respondent knowledge. The data from Benin fill both of these gaps.

They confirm that radios do broadcast information on health and, specifically, malaria. Moreover, these broadcasts are relevant both for accountability (the existence and timing of free bed net distribution) and household behavior (the importance of using bed nets). Nevertheless, consistent with the reduced-form estimations that find no effect of radio access on government accountability and a significant effect on household behavior, radio access has similarly little effect on knowledge relevant for government accountability, namely, government health policies. Instead, access has significant effects on knowledge relevant for private household health practices.

The data do not allow for an evaluation of the welfare consequences of the diversion of bed nets to the paid market. First, they do not reveal whether local officials use bed net payments to subsidize other health interventions provided by health centers, or for private purposes. Second, they do not indicate whether households that pay for bed nets are more or less vulnerable to malaria compared to households that would have received the bed nets for free. Third, we cannot measure the effects of media on how households utilize the nets – better utilization may offset any welfare losses due to the effects of pricing on how bed nets are distributed across households.

The literature reviewed earlier yields mixed evidence on whether the shift from free to paid bed nets and other health products increases their appropriate use by households most in need of them. The diversion of free bed nets to the paid market may therefore have no significant impact on how they are used nor on who uses them. If this is the case, the results here suggest that the main impact of media coverage of malaria and malaria prevention may be to reduce the consumer surplus of households while either increasing the welfare of households that receive health care subsidized by bed net payments or increasing the welfare of local officials who retain the payments received from the sale of bed nets that they would otherwise have had to distribute for free.

The results point to the need for caution in combining supply- and demand-side interventions to improve health practices in poor countries with weak institutions. On the one hand, access to media offers no guarantee that citizens will be able to hold governments accountable for the quality of public policies in environments where constraints to political responsiveness are more substantial. On the other hand, radio access can have a substantial positive effect on private household health behavior, provided that the stations broadcast relevant programming about the importance of health practices. However, government officials can moderate their strategies for distributing health benefits in response to changes in household demand; the potential endogeneity of distribution strategies to marketing efforts is a key issue that policy makers should bear in mind.

Our analysis examines only the effects of media access and does not test the efficacy of concerted efforts to broadcast programming that encourages citizens to increase government responsiveness. Evidence from Brazil suggests that greater access to radio played a facilitating role in reducing local government corruption during a campaign of public disclosure of audit findings of 31