| Abstract: |
Free trade in audio-visual services has faced opposition on the grounds that
foreign media undermine domestic culture, and ultimately, global diversity. We
assess the media-culture link using name frequencies as a measure of tastes.
Using a 47-year panel of French birth registries, we first show that names
appearing on television shows, movies, or in songs are about five times more
popular than other names. Most, but not all, of this relationship arises from
endogeneity: song and script writers, as well as performers and their parents,
select names that would be popular anyway. Using name attributes, fixed
effects, and lagged popularity as controls, our regression results suggest
that media affect choices by informing parents of unfamiliar names. |