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...

While the tobacco industry is among the most substantial and successful economic enterprises, tobacco consumption kills more people than any other product. Economic analysis of tobacco product markets, particularly for cigarettes, has contributed considerable insight to debates about the...

Tobacco advertising is a public health issue if these activities increase smoking. Although public health advocates assert that tobacco advertising does increase smoking, there is significant empirical literature that finds little or no effect of tobacco advertising on smoking. In this paper,...

Online sources sometimes publish information that is false or intentionally misleading. We study the role of social networks and advertising on social networks in the dissemination of false news stories about childhood vaccines. We document that anti-vaccine Facebook groups disseminate false...

This paper studies government and private marketing activities in the context of the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace. Using detailed TV advertising data, we present evidence that government and private advertising are targeted to different geographical areas and provide...

A central challenge in estimating the causal effect of TV advertising on demand is isolating quasi-random variation in advertising. Political advertising, which topped $14 billion in expenditures in 2016, has been proposed as a plausible source of such variation and thus a candidate for an...

The two components of the advertising industry - the creative sector that develops and produces messages, and the communications sector that transmits messages via various media - have each been greatly affected by advances in creative design and communications technologies. As the media...

We study how firms differ from their competitors using new time-varying measures of product differentiation based on text-based analysis of product descriptions from 50,673 firm 10-K statements filed yearly with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This year-by-year set of product...

Expenditures on prescription drugs are one of the fastest growing components of national health care spending, rising by almost three-fold between 1995 and 2007. Coinciding with this growth in prescription drug expenditures has been a rapid rise in direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA), made...

We provide a selective survey of empirical evidence on the effects as well as the drivers of persuasive communication. We consider persuasion directed at consumers, voters, donors, and investors. We organize our review around four questions. First, to what extent does persuasion affect the...