evidence from Benin implies that transparency interventions should focus on how issues are framed in order to address these other political constraints.

The literature review that follows identifies the contribution of the paper both to prior research on media effects and to research on the determinants of bed net take-up by households. Section 3 describes elements of bed net distribution and the media market in Benin that are essential to understanding our empirical strategy. A discussion of that strategy – the identification of media effects – follows next in Section 4. The empirical hypotheses and results are then presented in Section 5. Our main results show significant effects of media access on the pricing of bed nets. We also present evidence on mechanisms and the effects of radio access on household knowledge. The main results are also robust to numerous alternative specifications. The conclusion in Section 6 highlights the policy implications of this work.

# **2. Literature review**

Prior research has found that greater media access by individual households or in narrow geographic jurisdictions increases the likelihood that these will receive targeted benefits from government programs. Citizens with greater media access are more informed about these programs and more likely to participate in political actions to hold government accountable for the delivery of these benefits. Anticipating this, governments target greater benefits to citizens with greater media access (e.g., Besley and Burgess 2002, Strömberg 2004). We find that, in a different policy context and institutional setting, governments respond to more informed citizens not by giving them greater benefits, but instead, by exploiting these citizens‘ greater willingness to pay for benefits.

The results here are related to those in Keefer and Khemani (2010), who use the same data from northern Benin and find that schools located in villages with greater radio access have no greater government-provided inputs (such as teachers or books), nor more responsive public agents (lower teacher absenteeism) nor more active PTAs. The research here provides a stronger test of whether more informed citizens receive greater benefits. First, both radio coverage and the pricing of government-provided bed nets are local. In the case of education, key decisions are national or departmental, well beyond the coverage of any individual community radio station. Second, mass media is likely to have a larger effect on government responsiveness in the implementation of a private benefits distribution program than in the provision of a broader public good like education, where government‘s contribution to final outcomes is difficult for households to discern.

In the case of education, for example, households are uncertain about whether their children are learning because of inputs provided by government departments, because of the actions of the front-line provider (the teacher), or because of the households‘ and children‘s own efforts. In order for media access to improve government accountability for better education services, media would have to provide information that allowed households to pinpoint the particular contribution of government policies to their welfare. This contribution is easier to define in the case of targeted transfer payments (as in previous research), or the provision of free mosquito bed nets, as in this paper. In the case of bed nets, for example, media programming provides sufficient information to households to identify the government‘s contribution when it indicates the importance of bed nets for the prevention of malaria and broadcasts details of the eligibility and timing of the government‘s bed net distribution program. As with transfer payments, households can immediately verify whether the nets are, in fact, freely available.

Despite the similarities of bed net provision and targeted transfer payments, previous research finds a significant effect of media access on the receipt of transfer payments, but we find no 5