American Idol: Evidence on Same-Race Preferences

Jungmin Lee

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2009, vol. 9, issue 1, 21

Abstract: This paper examines whether viewers of the popular television show, American Idol, exhibit racial preferences. We find evidence on same-race preferences among black viewers only: when there are more black contestants in the show, more black viewers are tuned in to watch it. The result is robust after we account for the endogeneity problem regarding the contestants' racial composition, which arises due to the voting mechanism. Our point estimates tell that a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of black contestants increases viewership ratings for black households by about 1.3 percentage points.

Keywords: racial preferences; same-race preferences; TV viewership ratings; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1682.2134 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Working Paper: American Idol: Evidence of Same-Race Preferences? (2006)
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:bpj:bejeap:v:9:y:2009:i:1:n:28

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.2202/1935-1682.2134

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().