The NYC Media Seminar was launched in Fall 2013 to provide a regular forum for economists interested in media markets to connect with each other and to current research on media topics.  The seminar is jointly organized by Lisa George at Hunter College and Miklos Sarvary at Columbia Business School and has been generously supported by the Columbia Media Program, the Associated Press, and Google.

The seminar is open to all researchers and draws speakers from across the US and abroad. Seminars are held the first Wednesday of each month during the academic year.   Seminars run 10:30-12:00 with ample time for questions and discussion.  For 2022-2023, we meet at Evercore, 55 East 52nd Street close to Grand Central.  

For more information and to receive login credentials with paper links, please register for the series listserv by sending an email to mailto:listserv@hunter.listserv.cuny.edu with SUBSCRIBE MEDIANYC-L in the e-mail message body (and nothing else).

2023-2024 Speaker Schedule

• October 4:  Joshua Schwartzstein (Harvard Business School) Sharing Models to Interpret Data
• November 1:  Holger Sieg (University of Pennsylvania) Access and Exposure to Local News Media in the Digital Era: Evidence from U.S. Media Markets
• December 6:  Imke Reimers (Cornell) The First Sale Doctrine and the Digital Challenge to Public Libraries
• February 7: Quan Le (Princeton) Network Competition and Exclusive Contracts: Evidence from News Agencies
• March 6: Steve Tadelis (UC Berkeley) Learning, Sophistication and the Returns to Advertising
• April 10 (* special date *): Ekaterina Zhuravskaya (Paris School of Economics) Reading Twitter in the Newsroom: How Social Media Affects Traditional-Media Reporting
• May 1: TBD

2022-2023 Speaker Schedule 

• November 2:  Koleman Strumpf (Wake Forest) All the Headlines that are Fit to Change 
• December 4:  Ricard Gil (Queens University) Do Search Engines Increase Concentration in Media Markets? 
• February 1:  Jonathan Moreno-Medina (UTSA) Local Crime News Bias: Extent, Causes and Consequences
• March 1:  Senthil Veeraraghavan (Wharton) Does Fake News Create Echo Chambers?
• April 5:  Michael Ewens (Columbia) Local Journalism under Private Equity Ownership
• May 3:  Ali Yurukoglu (Stanford GSB) Pricing Power in Advertising Markets: Theory and Evidence
• June 7: James Siderius (MIT CS) A Model of Online Misinformation

• 2021-2022 Speaker Schedule: (Zoom ID 898 4051 7316) 

• October 6: Tianyi Wang (Princeton) Media, Pulpit, and Populist Persuasion: Evidence from Father Coughlin
• November 3: Jason Choi (Rutgers) Open and Private Exchanges in Display Advertising
• December 1: Ricardo Puglisi (University of Pavia) The Revealed Demand for Hard vs. Soft News: Evidence from Italian TV Viewership
• February 2: Alexandre Garel (Audencia): Music Sentiment and Stock Returns Around the World
• March 2: Ken Wilbur (UCSD) How Viewer Tuning, Presence and Attention Respond to Ad Content and Predict Brand Search Lift
• April 6: Kristoffer Nimark (Cornell)  Attention Costs, Economies of Scale and Markets for Information
• May 11 (note date change): Fiona Scott Morton (Yale) How does the new antitrust paradigm affect media markets?
• June 1: Nikita Melnikov (Princeton) Mobile Internet and Political Polarization

Spring 2021 Zoom Schedule:

• February 3: Christian Peukert (Lausanne) “The Editor vs. the Algorithm: Targeting, Data and Externalities in Online News“
• March 3: Maria Petrova (Pompeu Fabra, NES) “Echo Chambers: Does Online Network Structure Affect Political Polarization”
• April 7: Ro’ee Levy (MIT) “Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment“
• May 5: Matthew Gentzkow (Stanford) “Digital Addiction”

Fall 2020 Zoom Schedule:

• October 7: Jim Snyder (Harvard) “Measuring the Partisan Behavior of U.S. Newspapers, 1880 to 1980“
•  November 4: Alexandre de Cornière (TSE) “Data and Competition: a General Framework with Applications to Mergers, Market Structure, and Privacy Policy”
• December 2: Brendan Nyhan (Dartmouth) “The effectiveness of Fact-checking on COVID-19 Misperceptions”

2019-2020 Speaker Schedule:

• October 2, 2019:  Brian Knight (Brown) “Opposition Media, State Censorship, and Political Accountability: Evidence from Chavez’s Venezuela”
• November 6: Daniel Treisman (UCLA) “Informational Autocrats”
• December 4: Dirk Bergemann (Yale) “Economics of Social Data”
• February 5: David Godes (University of Maryland) “Media Bias in the Presence of Feedback“
• March 4:   Anna Tuchman (Northwestern) “Generalizable and Robust TV Advertising Effects”
• April 1:  Andrey Simonov (Columbia) “What Drives Demand for Government-Controlled News? Evidence from Russia” [CANCELLED]
• May 6:  Charles Angelucci and Andrea Pratt (Columbia) “Measuring Voters’ Knowledge of Political News” [ZOOM SESSION]
• June 2:  Andrey Simonov (Columbia) “Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Non-Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic” [ZOOM SESSION, NOTE CHANGE TO TUESDAY] 

2018-2019 Speaker Schedule:

• October 3, 2018:  James Snyder (Harvard) “Is Soft News a Turn-Off? Evidence from Italian TV News Viewership”
• November 7, 2018:  Sarah Moshary (University of Chicago) “Price Discrimination in Political Advertising: Evidence from the 2012 US Presidential Elections”
• December 5, 2018:  Zsolt Katona (UC Berkeley) “The Impact of Curation Algorithms on Social Network Content Quality and Structure”
• February 6, 2019:  Dean Eckles (MIT) “Established publishers’ adoption of native advertising”
• March 6, 2019:  Daniel Stone (Bowdoin) “What Drives Demand for Media Slant?“
• April 3, 2019:   David Yang (Stanford) “The Impact of Media Censorship: 1984 or Brave New World?”
• May 1, 2019:  Jacopo Perego (Columbia) “Media Competition and the Source of Disagreement”

2017-2018 Speaker Schedule:

• October 4, 2017:  Leopoldo Fergusson (Universidad de los Andes) Social Media and Collective Action Around the World: Evidence from Facebook
• November 1, 2017:  Michael Sinkinson (Yale School of Management)  Media Competition and News Diets
• December 6, 2017:  Alexandre de Corniere (Toulouse School of Economics) Social Media and the News Industry
• February 7, 2018:  Marcus Mobius (Microsoft Research) The Impact of Aggregators on News Consumption
• March 7, 2018:  James Snyder (Harvard University) Is Soft News a Turn-Off? Evidence from Italian TV News Viewership
• April 4, 2018:  Luigi Zingales (University of Chicago)
• May 2, 2018: Adam Szeidl (Central European University)

2016-2017 Speaker Schedule:

• October 5, 2016: Neil Gandal (Tel Aviv University) Online Exploration and Content Choice: An Experiment
• November 2, 2016: Hanna Halaburda (Bank of Canada) Can We Predict the Winner in a Market with Network Effects? Competition in Cryptocurrency Market
• December 7, 2016: Simon Anderson (University of Virginia) Advertising Congestion, Time-use, and Media Variety
• February 1, 2017: Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota): Preference Externalities and the Rise of China: Measuring their Impact on Consumers and Producers in Global Film Markets
• March 1, 2017: Pinar Yildirim (University of Pennsylvania), Social Media and Political Donations: New Technology and Incumbency Advantage in the United States
• April 5, 2017: Lapo Filistrucchi (University of Florence), Price Competition in Two Sided Markets, papers here and here.  (We meet in the Albert Einstein room in the Chelsea Market building.  Either wait for Mikos or Lisa to escort, or take Elevator 12 (near Bowery Kitchen Supplies) to Google reception on the 7th floor.)
• May 3, 2017: Garrett Johnson (University of Rochester and Northwestern University), The Online Display Ad Effectiveness Funnel & Carry-Over: A Meta-Study of Predicted Ghost Ad Experiments
  

2015-2016 Speaker Schedule:

• October 7, 2015: Babur De Los Santos (Indiana University) E-Book Pricing and Vertical Restraints
• November 11, 2015: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Google)  “New data and media economics?”
• December 2, 2015: Matthew Baker & Lisa George (Hunter College) “The News Hour: Welfare Estimation in the Market for Local TV News“
• February 3, 2016: Brian Knight (Brown) “The Limits of Propaganda: Evidence from Chavez’s Venezuela“
• March 2, 2016: Michaela Draganska (Drexel) “Digital Content Variety and Customer Subscription Behavior: An investigation of adult online entertainment”
• April 6, 2016: Julia Cage’ (Sciences Po Paris) Newspapers in Times of Low Advertising Revenues“
• May 4, Ruben Durante (Sciences Po Paris) Attack when the World is Not Watching?  International Media and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Please note that the November talk this season will be held the second rather than first Wednesday of the month!

2014-2015 Speaker Schedule:

• • October 1, 2014: Przemyslaw Jeziorski (UC Berkeley) “An Empirical Model of Dynamic Merger Enforcement: Choosing Ownership Caps in US Radio“

• • November 5, 2014: Nicholas Economides (NYU) “The Economics of Net Neutrality,” more here.

• • December 3, 2014: Stefano DellaVigna (UC Berkeley) “Does Media Concentration Lead to Biased Coverage? Evidence from Movie Reviews”

• • February 4, 2015: Greg Crawford (University of Zurich) “The Welfare Effects of Vertical Integration in Multichannel Television Markets”

• • March 4, 2015: Justin Rao (Microsoft Research) “Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media Bias Through Crowdsourced Content Analysis”

• • April 1, 2015: Jeremiah Dittmar (LSE) “New Media, Markets, and Institutional Change: Evidence from the Protestant Reformation”

• May 6, 2015:  David Stromberg (University of Stockholm), “Social Media in China”

 2013-2014 Speaker Schedule:

• • October 2, 2013: Luis Cabral (NYU),“Motion Picture Supply and Demand”

• • November 6, 2013: Catherine Tucker (MIT), “Viral Video Ad Campaigns”

• • December 4, 2013: Andrea Prat (Columbia Business School), “Measuring Media Power”

• • February 5, 2014: David Stromberg (Stockholm University), “The Determinants of Media Bias in China”

• • March 5, 2014: Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota), “Cinematic Explosion: Movies, Gatekeepers and Product Discovery in the Digital Era” 

• • April 2, 2014:  Matthew Gentzkow (University of Chicago), “Do Newspapers Serve the State? Incumbent Party Influence on the US Press, 1869-1928”

• May 7, 2014: Tamas David-Barrett (Oxford University), “Evolutionary Foundations of Behavior on Social Media”. View additional research on limitations to social group size, testing constraints on social network size, and the effects of laughter on happiness within different modes of communication.