A New View On TV

In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this year, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro presented a series of analyses that showed that the advent of television might actually have had a positive effect on children's cognitive ability. The group's research suggests TV enabled an earlier generation of American children in non-English-speaking households to do better in school, helped rural Indian women to become more independent and contributed to lowering Brazil's fertility rate.