This paper investigates whether newspapers report more favorably about advertising corporate clients than about other firms. Our identification strategy based on high-dimensional fixed effects and high frequency advertising data shows that advertising leads to more positive press coverage. This...

The benefits of advanced information and communication services are increasingly dependent on the quality of the available connectivity. This paper examines the factors that influence the quality of fixed and mobile broadband access in OECD countries. Drawing on institutional economics, the...

Commercial ceilings not only restrict broadcasters in their decisions about commercial broadcasting time, but also affect their differentiation of program content. This study examines the welfare effects of commercial ceilings in a two-sided free-to-air TV market, taking into account welfare...

This paper develops a fairly general model of platform competition in media markets allowing viewers to use multiple platforms. This leads to a new form of competition between platforms, in which they do not steal viewers from each other, but affect the viewer composition and thereby the...

Sampling poses an interesting problem in markets with experience goods. On the one hand, free samples reveal product quality and help consumers to make informed purchase decisions (promotional effect). On the other hand, sampling may induce consumers to substitute purchases with free consumption...

Real life applications of Yardstick Regulation frequently refer to historical cost data. While Yardstick Regulation cuts the link between firms own costs and prices firms may charge in a static setting, it does not in a dynamic setting where historical cost data is used. A firm can influence the...

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...

This paper studies the institutional design of newspaper and periodical wholesale. Motivated by recent developments in Germany, we compare the efficiency properties of two alternative regimes for determining the wholesale margins: collective bargaining (as practised in Germany for the last...

How far can media undermine democratic institutions and how persuasive can it be in assuring public support for dictator policies? We study this question in the context of Germany before World War II, between 1929 and 1939. First, we estimate the impact of radio signal on voting for the Nazi...

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...