This paper investigates the timing of labour strikes in Hollywood. The occurrence of strikes, such as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023, can make sense when we have the hindsight to piece together the historical details of what created rifts between labour and management. But was 2023 a...

Ad-avoidance technologies such as ad-blocking devices in browsers have become mainstream tools in recent years and escaped their role as niche applications that are only for the technically savvy. While technical impacts of those tools are well researched, their effects on actual consumer...

This paper examines the effects of increased transparency over online news sources, e.g. due to news aggregators, on online news outlets and the advertising industry. The role of news aggregators is controversially discussed, where the discussion widely points on user side effect. The present...

We use a new dataset on the Swiss newspaper industry from 1999 to 2008 to estimate the substitution patterns between free newspapers and traditional media. Our identification strategy exploits the timing of free newspaper entry and allows for confounding trends. We find that the entry of free...

In Germany, the TV broadcasting of the Winter Olympics 2010 marked the official start of high definition television (HDTV). However, the transition from standard to high definition television has been significantly hampered by inconsistent change management. While the large international movie...

This paper investigates the existence of a possible media bias by analyzing the impact of automobile manufactures' advertisements on automobile reviews in German car magazines. By accounting for both endogeneity and sample selection we find a positive impact of advertising volumes on test...

During the last decade the internet has been the fastest growing segment in advertising. Exploiting Nielsen data, we analyze the advertising pattern displayed by the population of organizations (i.e. companies, non-profit institutions and public entities) that were active on the Italian national...

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...

A welfare-maximizing Public Service Broadcaster (PSB) broadcasts both information-type and show-type content if (i) the information consumption of TV viewers generates external benefits for society by improving the ability of voters to control politicians and (ii) the marginal external benefits...