 The Language and Geographic Scope of Cultural and Media ProductsRamon Caminal No 1485, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Abstract: This paper presents a theoretical framework for stuyding language choices in cultural and media markets. From a positive point of view, the analysis emphasizes that the share of consumption in the minority language in a specific product category crucially depends on the availability of content with a local focus (targetting local consumers). We argue that such a prediction can help rationalize the large dispersion in the presence of the minority language across different product categories widely observed. In the case of Catalonia, we document that the percentage of consumption in the minority language (Catalan) provided by private firms is quite large for theater, negligible for cinema and television, and intermediate for books and radio. Differences in the relative weight of content with a local focus can account for a substantial portion of this dispersion. From a normative point of view, we show that market forces tend to provide too few products in the minority language relative to the social optimum (insufficient linguistic diversity), even when products with a local focus abound. Public policies fostering local content and the use of the minority language are also discussed. Keywords: language; content; business stealing; better preference matching (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1485 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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