Ilaria Malisan (Social Inclusion Lab, Dondena - Bocconi)
This paper compares literacy rates in 1960s Italy among municipalities with differential access to televised classes specifically geared to adult workers. Exploiting Census data and TV signal exposure differences due to an expanding national TV system and geographical constraints in a continuous differences in differences setting, I find that going from 0% to 100% of the population within a municipality being served by TV signal, and hence being able to watch the educational TV program, leads to a 1 percentage point increase in literacy rates. This explains 18% of the increase in average literacy rate that happened around the educational TV program airing years. While this estimate increases to 1.6 percentage points if we consider men only, estimates are not statistically different from zero if we only consider women, likely due to gender norms preventing access to communal TVs for women.