The hidden costs of losing your city’s newspaper

A segment of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” inspired Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business finance professor Paul Gao to research what happens to cities when their local newspapers shut down. His research was featured in a recent CityLab article. Read the full story here. 

By examining local municipal bond data for these counties, the researchers were able to suss out a relationship between local newspaper closures and public finance outcomes. In the three years following a newspaper closure, the costs for municipal bonds and revenue bonds increased for these cities

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