We use data on US newspapers from the early 20th century to study the economic incentives that shape ideological diversity in the media. We show that households prefer like-minded news, and that newspapers seek both to cater to household tastes and to differentiate from their competitors. We...

Between 2006 and 2011, daily print newspapers in the U.S. lost 20% of their paid subscribers, partly due to increasing availability of alternative sources of news, such as free content provided on newspaper websites and by news aggregators such as Yahoo. However, contrary to the expectation that...

Publishers produce books in hardcover and paperback versions with different prices and time of market introduction. Analysis of detailed book-level data reveals that (i) price-cost differentials cannot be explained by cost differences, making this an example of quality discrimination; (ii)...

Publishers produce books in hardcover and paperback versions with different prices and time of market introduction. Analysis of detailed book-level data reveals that (i) market introduction time has a strong effect on sales, suggesting that time is the crucial dimension of discrimination; (ii)...

This paper analyzes the role of uncertainty in a multi-sector housing model with financial frictions. We include time varying uncertainty (i.e. risk shocks) in the technology shocks that affect housing production. The analysis demonstrates that risk shocks to the housing production sector are a...

Recent studies suggest a considerable amount of horizontal strategic interaction amongst governments exists. The empirical approach in these studies typically relies on estimating reaction functions in a uni-dimensional policy framework, where a nonzero slope estimate suggests strategic...

We test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are more likely to use fiscal zoning to attract retailing. We find that total retail employment is not significantly affected by local sales tax rates, but employment in big box and anchor...

A model of racial discrimination provides testable implications for two features of statistical discriminators: differential treatment of signals by race and heterogeneous experience that shapes perception. We construct an experiment in the U.S. rental apartment market that distinguishes...

We test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are more likely to use fiscal zoning to attract retailing. We find that total retail employment is not significantly affected by local sales tax rates, but employment in big box and anchor...