We use new data on entries and exits of US daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation, party vote shares, and electoral competitiveness. Our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and allows for the possibility of confounding...

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand,...

In this paper we connect the discrepancy between two estimates of Fisher information, one based on the quadratic variation of the score and the other based on the negative Hessian of the log-likelihood, to weak identification. Classical asymptotic approximations assume that these two estimates...

Popular accounts suggest that advertising revenue per unit of consumer attention is lower online than offline, and has fallen in traditional media as the Internet has made advertising markets more competitive. I assess these claims theoretically and empirically, and compare the patterns we...

We study the long-run evolution of brand preferences, using new data on consumers' life histories and purchases of consumer packaged goods. Variation in where consumers have lived in the past allows us to isolate the causal effect of past experiences on current purchases, holding constant...

We study the design of informational environments in settings where generating information is costly. We assume that the cost of a signal is proportional to the expected reduction in uncertainty. We show that Kamenica & Gentzkow's (2011) concavification approach to characterizing optimal signals...

When is it possible for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a symmetric information model where a sender chooses a signal to reveal to a receiver, who then takes a noncontractible action that affects the welfare of both players. We derive necessary and sufficient...

Many important economic questions hinge on the extent to which new goods either crowd out or complement consumption of existing products. Recent methods for studying new goods rule out complementarity by assumption, so their applicability to these questions has been limited. I develop a new...

The controversy over how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests, in part, on whether higher prices can increase use, either by targeting distribution to high-use households (a screening effect), or by stimulating use psychologically through a sunk-cost effect. We...