We measure the impact of direct-to-consumer television advertising (DTCA) by drug manufacturers. Our identification strategy exploits shocks to local advertising markets generated by the political advertising cycle and a regulatory intervention affecting a single product. We find evidence of significant business stealing effects among branded, advertised drugs. In addition, we show positive spillovers from drug advertisements to non-advertised competitors in the same class. We decompose the effect and show it is primarily due to new customers. Finally, we provide evidence that DTCA is cost-effective from a societal standpoint in our setting.

We explore the implications of ownership concentration for the recently concluded incentive auction that repurposed spectrum from broadcast TV to mobile broadband usage in the United States. We document significant multilicense ownership of TV stations. We show that in the reverse auction, in which TV stations bid to relinquish their licenses, multilicense owners have an incentive to withhold some TV stations to drive up prices for their remaining TV stations. Using a large-scale valuation and simulation exercise, we find that this strategic supply reduction increases payouts to TV stations by between 13.5 percent and 42.4 percent. (D44, D47, H82, L13, L82, L88)

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand, entry, and political affiliation choice in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. We use a combination of estimation and calibration to identify the model's parameters from novel data on newspaper circulation, costs, and revenues. The estimated model implies that competition enhances ideological diversity, that the market undersupplies diversity, and that optimal competition policy requires accounting for the two-sidedness of the news market.

We use new data on entries and exits of US daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation, party vote shares, and electoral competitiveness. Our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and allows for the possibility of confounding trends. We focus our analysis on the years 1869– 1928, and we use the remaining years of data to look at changes over time. We find that newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation, with one additional newspaper increasing both presidential and congressional turnout by approximately 0.3 percentage points. Newspaper competition is not a key driver of turnout: our effect is driven mainly by the first newspaper in a market, and the effect of a second or third paper is significantly smaller. The effect on presidential turnout diminishes after the introduction of radio and television, while the estimated effect on congressional turnout remains similar up to recent years. We find no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares, with confidence intervals that rule out even moderate-sized effects. We find no clear evidence that newspapers systematically help or hurt incumbents.