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Title: | Essays on the Economics of Newspapers in American History |
Authors: | Le, Quan |
Advisors: | Ho, Katherine |
Contributors: | Economics Department |
Subjects: | Economics |
Issue Date: | 2024 |
Publisher: | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University |
Abstract: | I present a series of essays related to the economics of newspapers in U.S. history and their impact on American society. The first chapter establishes the importance of subscriptions to news agencies to reader demand of newspapers in the early 20th century. I show that the value of news agencies exhibits strong network effects due to the sharing of local news across member newspapers within each agency. The second chapter studies the role of exclusive vertical contracting in competition between news agencies. I show that exclusive territory contracts between the Associated Press (AP) and member newspapers inadvertently created demand for and facilitated the growth of the AP's primary rival, United Press. I do so by estimating a model of newspaper entry and news agency network formation. I find that demand-side network effects established in the previous chapter and supply-side economies of scale form considerable natural barriers to entry for news agencies. In a counterfactual where exclusive contracts were illegal, United Press would have likely exited. The third chapter, written jointly with Anaïs Galdin, studies the role of daily newspapers in providing information to migrants and facilitating urbanization in the U.S. between 1870 and 1940. We show that access to information about urban health conditions through local newspapers contributed to rural-urban migration during our study period. |
URI: | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp013t945v14d |
Type of Material: | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) |
Language: | en |
Appears in Collections: | Economics |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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Le_princeton_0181D_15026.pdf | 4.23 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Download |
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