Dead Poet's Property - How Does Copyright Influence Price?

Xing Li, Megan MacGarvie and Petra Moser

No 21522, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This article exploits a differential increase in copyright under the UK Copyright Act of 1814 - in favor of books by dead authors – to examine the influence of longer copyrights on price. Difference-in-differences analyses, which compare changes in the price of books by dead and living authors, indicate a substantial increase in price in response to an extension in copyright length. By comparison, placebo regressions for books by dead authors that did not benefit from the extension indicate no differential increase. Historical evidence suggests that longer copyrights increase price by improving publishers’ ability to practice intertemporal price discrimination.

JEL-codes: K00 N33 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-his, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
Note: DAE IO PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21522.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Dead Poets’ Property - How Does Copyright Influence Price (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21522

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21522

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().