The media and discretionary behaviour of bureaucrats

Abstract

Due to the public good character of protective measures against natural disasters, their allocation is very often in the realm of bureaucratic and expert agencies. I analysed the effect of negative media reports on a bureaucratic agency's output decisions by applying a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model on annual data of the US Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) spending on flood protection from 1968 to 2008. The results showed that the negative media reports about the agency subsequently increase formal output.

Keywords:

• theory of bureaucracy
• natural hazards
• media
• VAR

JEL Classification:

• D72
• D73
• D81
• Q54

Notes

¹ These years include: 1972, 1977, 1979, 1983, 1993, 1994, 1997 and 2005.

² Results available upon request.