Market Competition, Station Ownership, and Local Public Affairs Programming on Broadcast Television

FCC Media Study 4: News Operations

The relationship between broadcast TV stations’ ownership characteristics and the quantity of news and public affairs programming they provided is examined, based on the scheduled programming of almost all full power broadcast TV stations for two weeks a year for the four-year period 2002 to 2005. Using a three-way group fixed effects model to control for unobserved market-specific, broadcast n...

Corruption and Competition in Public Market Auctions

This paper investigates the effect of corruption on competition in government procurement auctions. Our assumption is that the bureaucrat (i.e. the agent that administers the market), if corrupt, may provide a favor in exchange for a bribe. The favor we consider in most of our analysis is the opportunity to readjust a bid. We show that a key effect of corruption is to facilitate collusion in pr...

Preserving Digital Public Television: Preparing for the Broadcast Afterlife

Broadcast Games and Digital Television

Digital television (DTV) allows simultaneous transmission of data along with traditional AV content. It provides an inexpensive and high bandwidth data pipe that enables new forms of interactive television and also new types of games, and other applications, for game consoles. This paper explores the potential role of DTV in future game titles and addresses how to merge television viewing with ...

Measuring the Effect of Multimarket Contact on Competition: Evidence from Mergers Following Radio Broadcast Ownership Deregulation

This paper examines the effects of multimarket contact on advertising prices in the U.S. radio broadcasting industry. While it is in general difficult to measure the effect of multimarket contact on competition, the 1996 Telecommunications Act substantially relaxed local radio ownership restrictions, giving rise to a major and exogenous consolidation wave. Between the years of 1995 to 1998, the...