Our study contributes to a large literature on the cognitive effects of television,most of which identifies the effect of television using cross-sectional variation in children’s viewing intensity. 5 It also contributes to a growing economic literature on the effects of media on children (Dahl and DellaVigna 2006), and on the effects of mass media more generally (see, for example, Djankov et al. [2003]; Gentzkow and Shapiro [2004, 2006]; Stromberg [2004]; Gentzkow [2006]; Olken [2006]; and DellaVigna and Kaplan [2007]). The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II discusses the history of the introduction and diffusion of televi- sion. Section III presents our data. Section IV discusses our iden- tification strategy.
