When a terrestrial radio station plays a song during its over-the-air broadcast, the artists and their record labels receive no compensation for the sound recording right. Yet radio's digital competitors — including streaming services and satellite radio — do pay performance royalties to...

The United States has recently reinvigorated its efforts to promote ubiquitous broadband at affordable prices for all Americans by both committing over $7.2 billion in stimulus funds and by requiring the Federal Communications Commission to issue a “National Broadband Plan.” The big policy...

The purpose of patent policy is to balance the incentive to invent against the ability of the economy to utilize and incorporate new inventions and innovations. Substandard patents that upset this balance impose deadweight losses and other costs on the economy. In this Policy Paper, we examine...

In the heated debate over Net Neutrality, the effects of regulation on investment are a central concern, with special attention given to the presence or absence of investment effects from the FCC's 2010 proposal and subsequent controversial 2015 decision to reclassify broadband Internet access...

Fees levied by local franchise authorities on cable television operators are limited to a statutory five-percent cap, though franchise authorities often skirt that maximum levy by demanding additional monetary and in-kind concessions from cable operators. The Federal Communications Commission...

In this Perspective, I attempt to quantify, by a Spatial Logit Model, the magnitude of the overstatement of broadband availability resulting from the FCC's all-in assumption whereby an entire census block is deemed to have broadband available when a single home does so. Given the computational...

Worried about being left behind in the Digital Age, a few hundred municipalities have chosen to construct and operate high-speed Internet networks. Above all else, it is the impacts on the labor market—i.e., the promise of “more jobs”—that form the policy justification for these...

Using data on the prices paid by multichannel video programing distributors (“MVPDs”) for basic cable networks, I conduct a retrospective analysis of the price effects of the Comcast-NBCU merger. Estimates from both the difference-in-differences and lagged-dependent variable models indicate...