Ad blockers allow Internet users to obtain information without generating ad revenue for site owners; and by 2016 they were used by roughly a quarter of site visitors. Given the ad-supported nature of much of the web, ad blocking poses a threat to site revenue and, if revenue losses undermine...

Digitization has vastly increased the amount of new music produced and available directly to consumers. While this has levelled the playing field between already-prominent and new artists, creators may now be dependent on platform decisions about which songs and artist to promote. With Spotify...

Radio signals are pure public goods whose total value to society is the sum of their value to advertisers and listeners. Because broadcasters can capture only part of the value of their product as revenue, there is the potential for a classic problem of underprovision. Small markets have much...

Political outcomes are well understood to depend on the spatial distribution of citizen preferences. In this paper, we document that the same holds for the individual decision to be politically active. Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence on turnout, we show that citizens are...

Both asymmetric information (AI) and divergent expectations (DE) theories offer possible explanations of the litigation puzzle. Under DE, cases proceed to trial when, by chance, the plaintiff is more optimistic than the defendant. As the fraction of cases tried (T) declines, this leads to a...

Recent literature notes that when quality is produced with fixed costs, a high quality firm can undercut its rival's prices and may find it profitable to invest more in quality as market size grows large. As a result, a market can remain concentrated even as it grows large. When quality is...

Existing studies of the impact of conviction on income and employment do not consider life cycle issues. We postulate that conviction reduces access to career jobs offering stable, long-term employment. Instead, conviction relegates offenders to spot market jobs, which may have higher pay at the...

While private monopolists are generally assumed to maximize profits, the goals of public enterprises are less well known. Using the example of Pennsylvania's state liquor retailing monopoly, we use information on store location choices, prices, wholesale costs, and sales to uncover the goals...

We study the tendency to connect to the Internet, and the online and offline shopping behavior of connected persons, to draw inferences about whether the Internet is a substitute or a complement for cities. We document that larger markets have more locally-targeted online content and that...

In May 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Rhode Island's ban on advertising prices of alcoholic beverages, making Rhode Island the subject of a natural experiment for measuring the impact of advertising on prices. Using Massachusetts prices as controls, we find that while advertising stores...