Publications - 2007

Appropriate Property Rights Regimes and Regulatory Processes for the Unconventional Gas Era

Effective property rights, conflict and growth

Episodic Nonlinear Event Detection in the Canadian Exchange Rate

Estimating the effects of movie piracy on box-office revenue

Piracy is one of the most challenging problems faced by the motion picture industry. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that US studios lose more than $3 billion annually in box office revenue from piracy. They have launched a major effort to prevent these losses. Yet their efforts are hampered by the ex post, counterfactual, and indirect methods by which losses are usually estimated. This paper addresses these issues directly. We develop and estimate a statistical model of the effects of piracy on the box-office performance of a widely-released movie. The model discredits the argument that piracy increases sales, showing unambiguously that Internet piracy diminished the box-office revenues of a widely released motion picture. The model overcomes a major weakness of counterfactual or “but for piracy” methods widely used to estimate damages. These counterfactual methods violate the “nobody knows” principle because they forecast what the movie would have earned in the absence piracy. The model we present does not violate this basic principle of motion picture uncertainty. We estimate that pre-release and contemporaneous Internet downloads of a major studio movie accelerated its box-office revenue decline and caused the picture to lose about $40 million in revenue.

Financing Health Care - New Ideas for a Changing Society

Handbook on International Trade Policy

Interest Group Competition over Policy Outcomes: Dynamics, Strategic Behavior, and Social Costs

Labor Adjustment Costs, Shocks, and the Real Business Cycle

Measuring Impatience: Elicited Discount Rates and the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale

Modelling Approaches to the Analysis of Trade Policy. Computable General Equilibrium and Gravity Models.

Nominal Wage Contracts and the Monetary Transmission Mechanism

Power plant investment in restructured markets

Price effects of boutique motor fuels

Federal clean air regulations have spawned a proliferation of motor fuel types that have created differentiated markets for motor fuels, increased the cost of supplying these fuels, and reduced the capacity of the supply infrastructure. In this paper we examine wholesale gasoline prices in 99 US cities over a time horizon of 204 weeks using a panel data regression model to explain fuel prices as a function of fuel attributes, the price of crude oil, and seasonal and city-market-specific effects. Our results show that fuel prices are related to the use of a special blend not widely available in the region and more costly to make, and the situation of the particular city market in relation to major refining centers or other sources of supply.

Productivity and Convergence Trends in the OECD: Evidence from a Normalized Quadratic Variable Profit Function

Revitalizing Russian Industry: the Road Ahead After Fifteen Years of Transition

Skill Uncertainty and Social Inference

The Demand for Money: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches.

The Effects of Recommended Play on Compliance with Ambient Pollution Instruments

The Production of Eco-Labels

Trade Creation and Trade Diversion; Analyzing the Impact of Regional Trade Agreements

Urban and Rural Disparity in Health Services Utilization in China

Will the TRIPS Agreement Foster Appropriate Biotechnologies for Developing Countries?