Essays in Media Economics

This thesis contributes to the understanding of media markets by studying the determinants of media outlets’ content choice, by developing novel techniques to assess media bias, and by analyzing the welfare effects of potential regulations. Chapter 2 demonstrates that advertising has a causal positive effect on content differentiation on YouTube, in particular, an exogenous increase in the technically feasible advertising quantity reduces the YouTubers’ probability to duplicate mainstream content. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 develop novel techniques and applications to measure political media bias. Finally, Chapter 6 shows that commercial media bias can be mitigated by a cap on advertising quantity. The results contribute to the literature on content differentiation in (digital) media markets, political media bias, commercial media bias, two-sided (media) markets, media content as a public good, and user-generated content