Abstract Global music sales have substantially fallen in the last four years. This paper uses a panel of country-level data to investigate the extent to which this is a consequence of file sharing. I find that countries with higher internet and broadband penetration have suffered higher drops in...

It appears that the Internet is soon going to fulfill its potential to become a giant on-demand repository of television shows (and movies) available asynchronously. As companies such as Netflix and Hulu increase their activities in this sphere, there are many unanswered questions about the...

Researchers have frequently used publicly available data on product ranks to estimate nonpublic sales quantities under the assumption that the distribution of sales follows a power law. Using population sales data for a product frequently thought to follow a power law—books—we find the...

A large fraction of the total supply of paper is produced with technologies that have serious adverse consequences on the environment and cause significant health problems, such as cancer. This paper reports on how Internet adoption affects paper consumption. The study used country-level panel...

Economists have long debated the degree to which inventive and artistic activities were either the result of instinctual urges on the part of creators, or the responses of creators to potential pecuniary rewards. Copyright and patent laws are based on a view that rewards are an important factor....