We formalize the editorial role of news media in a multisector economy and show that can be an independent source business cycle fluctuations, even when they report accurate information. Public reporting about subset sectoral developments are newsworthy but unrepresentative causes firms across all sectors to hire too much or little labor. construct historical measures US coverage use them calib...

I study the persuasive effects of slanted language, exploiting a ban on politically charged term “illegal immigrant” by Associated Press (AP) news wire. My empirical strategy combines timing with variation across media outlets in their baseline reliance AP copy. document sizable diffusion from copy to outlets. Moreover, individuals exposed through local show significantly lower support for rest...

Digitization has led to many new creative products, straining the capacity of professional critics and consumers. Yet, digitization retailing also delivered crowd-based sources pre-purchase information. We compare relative impacts Amazon star ratings on consumer welfare in book publishing. Using various fixed effects discontinuity-based empirical strategies, we estimate their causal sales. use ...

Given a scarcity of journal space, what is the optimal rule for whether an empirical finding should be published? Suppose publications inform public about policy-relevant state. Then journals publish extreme results, meaning ones that move beliefs sufficiently. This may take form one- or two-sided test comparing point estimate to prior mean, with critical values determined by cost-benefit analy...

Recent developments in social media have morphed the age-old practice of paying influential individuals for product endorsements into a multibillion dollar industry, extending well beyond celebrity sponsorships. We develop parsimonious model which influencers trade off increased revenue they obtain from paid with negative impact that these on their followers’ engagement and, therefore, price re...

This paper studies the electoral consequences of television stardom through career Ronald Reagan. I utilize quasi-experimental variation in reception to estimate causal effect celebrity exposure on political support. find that Reagan’s tenure as host a 1950s entertainment program translated into support for his candidacy, terms votes and donations, nearly two decades after show’s first airing. ...

I quantify the relationship between private–network file sharing activity and album sales in the BitTorrent era using a panel of 2,109 albums’ U.S. sales and file sharing downloads during 2008. Exogenous shocks to file sharing capacity address the simultaneity problem. In theory, piracy could crowd out sales by building file sharing capacity or increase them through word of mouth. I find eviden...

In this paper, we consider the competition of providers of information products against P2P networks that offer illegal versions of the information products. Depending on the generic cost factor of downloading—incorporating factors including, among other things, the degree of legal enforcement of intellectual property rights—we find that the firm may employ pricing strategies to either deter th...

This paper investigates the extent to which strategic objectives of the U.S. government influenced news coverage during the latter part of the Cold War (1976-88). We establish two reduced form relationships: 1) strategic objectives of the U.S. government causes the State Department to under-report human rights violations of political allies; and 2) these objectives reduce news coverage of human...

In this paper we utilise a stochastic address model of broadcast oligopoly markets to analyse the Australian broadcast television market. In particular, we examine the effect of the presence of a single government market participant in this market. An examination of the dynamics of the simulations demonstrates that the presence of a government market participant can simultaneously generate posi...