I report historical prices and estimate financial returns to investing in rare books. My sample consists of 25 fiction titles recommended by Clifton Fadiman in his 1960 Lifetime Reading Plan. Relying on prices realized at American and British auction houses between 1975 and 2018, I use hedonic...

Rare books of political economy are eminently collectable. Using historical prices, I employ hedonic regressions to estimate financial returns to collecting the works of ten eminent political economists and develop a price index for this corpus of collectables. For the observation period...

Digital technology has allowed inventors to circumvent traditional intermediaries and directly reach consumers, which may affect licensing outcomes and efficiency in the market for ideas. We study these impacts theoretically and empirically in the book publishing industry, where the number of...

The agency model used by Apple and other platform providers such as Google allows upstream firms (content providers like book publishers and developers of apps) to choose the retail prices of their products (RPM) subject to a fixed revenue-sharing rule. We show that (i) this leads to higher...