In this paper we make use of a quasi-experiment in the market for illegal downloading to study movie box office revenues. Exogenous variation comes from the unexpected shutdown of the popular file hosting platform Megaupload.com on January 19, 2012. The estimation strategy is based on a quasi...

Making video clips of a song unavailable on YouTube has no effect on its sales on iTunes; but album sales suffer when video clips of a song from it are made unavailable on YouTube. These findings of a study by Tobias Kretschmer and Christian Peukert suggest that we need not worry too much about...

The introduction of a new product generation forces incumbents in network industries to rebuild their installed base to maintain an advantage over potential entrants. We study if backward compatibility moderates this process of rebuilding an installed base. Using a structural model of the U.S....

We study the market for applications on Facebook, the dominant platform for social networking and make use of a rule change by Facebook by which high-quality applications were rewarded with further opportunities to engage users. We find that the change led to quality being a more important...

We estimate the effect of broadband infrastructure, which enables high-speed internet, on economic growth in the panel of OECD countries in 1996-2007. Our instrumental variable model derives its non-linear first stage from a logistic diffusion model where pre-existing voice telephony and cable...

We review the recent literature on market structure, firm strategies and public policy in network industries. In particular, we focus on the latest applied work, including case studies and empirical work as well as refinements of the established theoretical results. We group each set of results...

Does good management and higher productivity come at the expense of work-life balance? Or is good work-life balance an important component of the management of successful firms? New research by Nick Bloom, Tobias Kretschmer and John Van Reenen finds evidence for a hybrid view between these two...

"This paper examines the relative productivity growth performance of a sample of large UK firms between 1986 and 1995. We find that superior productivity growth, however measured, is not persistent-firms with high productivity growth rates relative to (say) the average in 1 yr are as likely as...

In this paper we treat workplace voice and systems of high-commitment human resource management (HCHRM) as technological innovations in order to account for the uneven diffusion patterns observed across establishments. Using British data, the paper finds that variables highlighted in the...

We analyse a stylised game of technology adoption with network effects and two new technologies. Potential adopters can adopt early, late or not at all. We show that one of the reasons for the failure of new technologies can be the presence of multiple incompatible variants of that technology....