provide a larger allocation of bed nets. If such a supply response occurred, households with greater radio access would report a larger number of bed nets. In fact, radio access has no effect on the total number of bed nets reported by households.

Further tests on the mechanism of radio effects are consistent with these reduced-form results. Households with more access to radio have greater knowledge of health issues that could affect their private demand for bed nets. However, they have no greater knowledge of government health policies that might influence their ability to hold local officials accountable.

The data do not reveal whether local officials retain household payments for bed nets as rents, or use the payments to finance other improvements in local health services. Other research (e.g., Reinikka and Svensson 2004) has interpreted evidence that local officials do not follow centrally-set rules as a sign of ―local capture‖. Such an interpretation is possible here, as well, since international donors, who are significant sources of bed nets provided by African governments, prefer free distribution (USAID, 2011). Our results are surprising, however, since they point to greater divergence from centrally-set rules precisely in locales where citizens are _better_ -informed. One explanation for this different result is ―issue framing‖ in media programming (Prat and Strömberg, 2011). Broadcasts that emphasize the health value of bed-nets trigger different behavior by local officials than does programming that emphasizes local government accountability for distributing these benefits.

Data on bed nets and radio access were gathered from a March 2009 survey of 4,200 households in 210 villages located across the 32 communes of northern Benin. The design of the survey allows us to circumvent three difficulties with estimating the effects of media access on whether households receive benefits from government distribution programs. The first is the lack of significant overlap between radio stations‘ broadcast areas and the jurisdiction for which government decision makers are responsible. Absent significant overlap, radio stations may not broadcast relevant information. The second is the endogeneity of media access. The third is the general absence of programmatic distribution of benefits in poor, young democracies.

With respect to the first difficulty, if the broadcast area of a radio station is much larger than the jurisdiction of the relevant government decision maker, it is unlikely that the actions of that particular decision maker will be the focus of media attention. On the other hand, if the broadcast area captures only a small part of a decision maker‘s jurisdiction, the individuals informed by those broadcasts are less likely to be able to influence decision maker actions. The radio market in this region of north Benin provides an appropriate overlap between broadcast area and government jurisdiction to test responsiveness to informed citizens. This market consists of twenty-one small, private, non-commercial or community radio stations organized at the commune level, the political and administrative jurisdiction at which village health center staff are managed and held responsible for distributing bed nets to households. Moreover, we can confirm from donor and government documents that these radio stations indeed carry programming about bed nets distribution and the health value of bed nets.

We address the identification problem by using a ―natural experiment‖ in these media markets in northern Benin, which provide for. Three characteristics of these markets ensure that substantial intra-commune variation in radio access across villages is exogenous to village characteristics. The first is the number and dispersion of small community stations. Because of the sheer number of small broadcasters with limited signal strength, insignificant geographic differences between villages lead to substantial variation in village access to radio signals, whether from within or from outside the commune.

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