This paper studies the market provision of a specific type of public good: radio and television broadcasts. Its main focus is to explore the ability of the market to provide broadcasting efficiently in a world in which broadcasters earn revenues by selling time to advertisers and advertisements...

Theory predicts that in markets with increasing returns, the number of differentiated products and resulting consumer satisfaction grow in market size. We document this phenomenon across 246 US radio markets. By a mechanism that we term 'preference externalities', an increase in the size of the...

Free entry into markets with decreasing average costs and differentiated products can result in an inefficient number of firms and suboptimal product variety. Because new firms and products draw their customers in part from existing products, concentration can affect incentives to enter as well...

In theory, free entry can lead to social inefficiency. When new products are substitutes for existing products, the business stolen from incumbents places a wedge between private and social benefits of entry. The business stealing effect can be offset if entry reduces prices or increases...

The ability of firms to reposition their products can determine the effects of demand shocks, mergers and policy interventions in differentiated product markets. This paper estimates a dynamic oligopoly model to measure repositioning costs in the commercial radio industry. Based on a set of...

In "Bowling Alone," Putnam (1995) famously argued that the rise of television may be responsible for social capital's decline. I investigate this hypothesis in the context of Indonesian villages. To identify the impact of exposure to television (and radio), I exploit plausibly exogenous...

There are 420 million young people in Africa today. Understanding how youth search for jobs and what affects their ability to find good jobs is of paramount importance. We do so using a field experiment tracking young job seekers for six years in Uganda's main cities. We examine how two standard...

A critical impediment to research on school-to-work programs has been the absence of large representative data sets with information on such programs. In contrast, the new NLSY (NLSY97) offers researchers opportunities to analyze direct evidence on school-to-work programs. In the NLSY97,...

We investigate the problem of predicting the average effect of a new training program using experiences with previous implementations. There are two principal complications in doing so. First, the population in which the new program will be implemented may differ from the population in which the...