This paper analyzes vertical restraints imposed by distributors on movie theaters in the movie exhibition industry. A structural model of industry demand and supply is estimated using a uniquely detailed panel data set of attendance and movie rental contracts collected directly from a sample of U.S. movie theaters. Welfare analysis indicates lifting the restraints would make consumers, movie th...

Price Discrimination in the Concert Industry Concert tickets can either be sold at a single price or at different prices to reflect the various levels of seating categories available. Here we consider how two product characteristics (the artist’s age and venue capacity) influence the likelihood that pop music concert tickets will be sold at different prices. We argue that valuation heterogeneit...

In this paper we empirically investigate whether changes in product market competition affect firm boundaries — the perennial make-or-buy problem. Exploiting regulation-induced shocks to entry barriers and differences in regulation enforcement across cities to obtain a source of exogenous variation in product-market competition, we establish a negative causal effect of competition (through redu...

We construct a new index of media slant that measures whether a news outlet’s language is more similar to a congressional Republican or Democrat. We apply the measure to study the market forces that determine political content in the news. We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized the...

This paper investigates how newspaper consumption a ects political engagement. To circumvent potential endogeneity issues, I use variation in European languages as an instrument for newspaper consumption. Speci cally, I consider variation in how much physical space languages require to express some given information content. I rst estimate such language e ciency from large bilingual text compil...

This paper argues that advertising should be viewed as a transaction between a consumer and a firm that potentially generates a mutual benefit. We develop that there exists a problem of adverse selection, however, which makes it impossible to establish direct markets for advertising. The media is viewed as an intermediary that can channel advertising and allocate it efficiently by screening con...

Are Workers in the Cultural Industries Paid Differently? Wage differentials between three sub-industries of the cultural industries and their respective main industry: The case of the Netherlands This paper aims to explore wage differentials between employees in three sub-industries of the cultural industries compared with the main (1-digit level) industry to which they belong. We use data from...

Hollywood blockbusters are usually released in the U.S. before other foreign markets. The release gaps have declined significantly over time and varied greatly across countries. While movie piracy has been suggested as an important determinant for the release gap decision of distributors, theory and evidence suggest there are other important determinants. In this paper, we use a discrete choice...

A Bayesian consumer who is uncertain about the quality of an information source will infer that the source is of higher quality when its reports conform to the consumer’s prior expectations. We use this fact to build a model of media bias in which firms slant their reports toward the prior beliefs of their customers in order to build a reputation for quality. Bias emerges in our model even thou...

Nelson investigated advertising placements for a diverse sample of 28 magazines and concluded that targeting of underage youth by alcohol advertisers was not occurring. Siegel et al. claim that my results suffer from collinearity, but fail to present a comprehensive measure of multicollinearity. For my model, variance inflation factors are within acceptable limits and estimation using redefined...