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on Cultural Economics |
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Issue of 2006‒02‒12
three papers chosen by Roberto Zanola Universita degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale |
| By: | Dominic Rohner; Anna Winestein; Bruno S. Frey |
| Abstract: | Trends in arts and culture tend to be longer-lasting and less fragile than in other fields such as clothing design. Most herding models are not able to explain such stability, instead predicting informational cascades to be fragile and fads to be frequent. The present contribution is able to explain the hysterisis of trends in arts by incorporating the accumulation of consumption capital into a herding model. Further, the model is tested empirically by analyzing measures of relative and absolute concentration in the television business. It is concluded that by being exposed to art and culture people accumulate consumption capital for a particular style or artist and that this mechanism tends to make herding in arts stable over time. |
| Keywords: | Art; Culture; Herding; Consumption Capital; Concentration |
| JEL: | C11 D82 D83 Z11 |
| Date: | 2006–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cra:wpaper:2006-05&r=cul |
| By: | Ours,Jan C. van (Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the reading of fiction books by 15-year-olds in 18 OECD countries. It appears that girls fiction books more often than boys, whereas boys read comic books more often than girls. The intensity by which children read fiction books is influenced by parental education, family structure, and the number of books and tv's at home. Reading comic books does not affect the reading of fiction books. Parents who want their children to read fiction books frequently should have a lot of books at home and at most one television. |
| Keywords: | reading;PISA-data; books |
| JEL: | L82 Z11 |
| Date: | 2006 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:kubcen:200603&r=cul |
| By: | Lapo Filistrucchi |
| Abstract: | Recent years have seen a surge in websites that provide news for free and, up to the end of 2001, daily newspapers in Italy have shown a growing trend towards making available online for free; the exact articles published on paper. To assess whether on-line news and traditional daily newspapers are substitute, complement or independent goods, I model the choice between different daily newspapers as a discrete choice among differentiated products. Considering the availability of a website as a newspaper characteristic and controlling for other observable and unobservable characteristics of newspapers and of the outside good, I estimate a logit model of demand on market level data from 1976 to 2001 for the main national daily newspapers in Italy. Results suggest that opening a website had a negative impact both on the sales of the newspaper who opened it and on those of its rivals. I calculate the implied short-run and approximated long-run losses in both sales and profits and provide some evidence of the additional negative effect stemming from the general availability of Internet and on-line news. Results also contribute to explaining why, starting from the end of 2001, many publishers introduced a fee to read on-line the paper edition of the newspaper. |
| Keywords: | daily newspapers, Internet, websites, substitution, discrete choice models, product differentiation, dynamics, market level data |
| JEL: | C2 D12 L12 O3 |
| Date: | 2005 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2005/12&r=cul |