Coding is all the rage. Many are arguing it is an essential skill for the modern economy. They believe it should be an essential part of the school curriculum. Fundamentally, what is being asked in coding is a very difficult exercise requiring skill development that has applicability well beyond coding. These skills are familar to those who do …
How is it exactly that cable companies in the US don't compete?
One of the arguments made in the proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger is that these two, very large cable companies do not actually compete. They are in different markets. This is something Tyler Cowen, for example, has pushed as a reason the merger should go ahead. Now this might be a good argument as to why, …
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Are music artists exiting the music business?
And by that I don't mean that music artists are not producing music but they are changing their businesses. This week the Apple-Beats acquisition became official. At the same time, there was news that Beats was not taking its design team with them to Apple. Suffice it to say, with that went my theory that …
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Will regulators really hold back self-driving cars?
Yesterday, Google pivoted on self-driving cars. Yes, I know we don't normally describe established firms as 'pivoting' but the notion applies when the same core idea (in this case, autonomous vehicles) is reapplied to a different customer set. For the self-driving car, this moved from retrofitting existing cars to Google building its own new and …
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Did the Internet Prevent all Invention from Moving to one Place?
The diffusion of the internet has had varying effects on the location of economic activity, leading to both increases and decreases in geographic concentration. In an invited column at VoxEU, Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and I presents evidence that the internet worked against increasing concentration in invention. This relationship is particularly strong for inventions with …
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Behavioural artists and piracy
Piracy is everywhere but in music artists' supply. That's the strong impression I get from the academic literature on the subject. There is evidence that piracy has reduced straight-up music sales revenue but overall it is unclear whether digitisation has impacted adversely on artist returns (because they make up losses with concert revenue and the …
How Hachette could fight back against Amazon
Amazon.com, in its zeal to keep book prices low, is in a large fight with Hachette -- the smallest of New York's big 5 publishers. According to the NYT, it started with tactics to crimp Hachette's sales and has now apparently led to the removal of many Hachette books including, ironically, the paperback version of Brad …
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Income-contingent IP enforcement: Paying for your right to party
We all know the issue with copyright and patent enforcement whereby some creative upstart uses some IP without permission only to be slapped down by the IP rights holder. And we all know that economics does not help us out much here to sort out what to do beyond: if you could just work out …
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Net neutrality may be harder to achieve than we thought
For the last few weeks I have been working on a paper out of the notes I posted on weak and strong net neutrality. The paper is now done (at least as a working paper) and it seems appropriate to summarise its main findings as some were unexpected. The first finding is one that I had …
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Is Netflix's place in the slow lane?
The recent interest in Net Neutrality has been spurred on by Netflix's fight with Comcast for a fast lane. The issue of whether a lack of access to a fast lane might stifle innovation is a big one (see here for an impassioned plea) but what I wanted to consider today was the more basic …
