Koleman S. Strumpf’s research while affiliated with Wake Forest University and other places

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Publications (27)


The arsenal of democracy: Production and politics during WWII
  • Article

October 2018

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29 Reads

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9 Citations

Journal of Public Economics

Paul W. Rhode

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Jr. James M. Snyder

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Koleman Strumpf

We study the geographic distribution of military supply contracts during World War II. This is a unique case, where $3 trillion current day dollars was spent. We find robust evidence consistent with the hypothesis that economic factors dominated the allocation of supply contracts, and that political factors—or at least winning the 1944 presidential election—were at best of secondary importance. General industrial capacity in 1939, as well as specialized industrial capacity for aircraft production, are strong predictors of contract spending across states. Electoral college pivot probabilities are weak predictors of contract (and new facilities) spending, and under the most plausible assumptions they are essentially unrelated to spending. This is true over the entire period 1940–1944, and also for shorter periods leading up to the election in November 1944. That is, we find no evidence of an electoral cycle in the distribution of funds.


Smoking and Mortality: New Evidence from a Long Panel

March 2018

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171 Reads

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47 Citations

International Economic Review

Many public health policies are rooted in findings from medical and epidemiological studies that fail to consider behavioral influences. Using nearly 50 years of data from Framingham Heart Study male participants, we evaluate the longevity consequences of different lifetime smoking patterns by jointly estimating smoking behavior and health outcomes over the life cycle, by richly including smoking and health histories, and by flexibly incorporating correlated unobserved heterogeneity. Unconditional difference‐in‐mean calculations that treat smoking behaviors as random indicate a 9.3 year difference in age of death between lifelong smokers and nonsmokers; our findings suggest the bias‐corrected difference is 4.3 years. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved


The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales, Revisited

November 2016

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60 Reads

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7 Citations

Information Economics and Policy

Even as we approach the twentieth anniversary of widespread file sharing, its impact on the sale of copyrighted material remains in dispute. We contributed to this debate with an early study, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” that was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2007. Perhaps surprisingly, we found that piracy contributed to the decline in music sales but was not the main cause. In this article, we review and respond to recent criticism of our work by Stan Liebowitz in Econ Journal Watch. We show how the use of proxies for file sharing can result in misleading conclusions. We close by reviewing what we know about the impact of file sharing on record sales today. In our view, new music formats are an important if understudied channel through which changes in technology influence the demand for entertainment.



File Sharing and Copyright

January 2010

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73 Reads

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126 Citations

NBER/Innovation Policy and the Economy

The advent of file sharing has considerably weakened effective copyright protection. Today, more than 60% of Internet traffic consists of consumers sharing music, movies, books, and games. Yet, despite the popularity of the new technology, file sharing has not undermined the incentives of authors to produce new works. We argue that the effect of file sharing has been muted for three reasons. (1) The cannibalization of sales that is due to file sharing is more modest than many observers assume. Empirical work suggests that in music, no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales is due to sharing. (2) File sharing increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices. The sale of more expensive complements has added to artists’ incomes. (3) In many creative industries, monetary incentives play a reduced role in motivating authors to remain creative. Data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. Since the advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply.


Historical Political Futures Markets: An International Perspective

January 2008

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37 Reads

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21 Citations

Political future markets, in which investors bet on election outcomes, are often thought a recent invention. Such markets in fact have a long history in many Western countries. This paper traces the operation of political futures markets back to 16th Century Italy, 18th Century Britain, and 19th Century United States. In the United States, election betting was a common part of political campaigns in the antebellum period, but became increasingly concentrated in the organized futures markets in New York City over the postbellum period.


Consumer Demand under Price Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence from the Market for Cigarettes

August 2007

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88 Reads

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33 Citations

Review of Economics and Statistics

We develop a demand model for goods that are subject to habit formation. We show that consumption plans of forward-looking individuals depend on preferences, current period prices, and individual beliefs about the evolution of future prices. Moreover, an increase in price uncertainty reduces consumption along the optimal path. With smoking as our application, we test the predictions of our model using a unique data set of prices for cigarettes and the restricted-use version of the National Education Longitudinal Study. Our estimation results suggest that teenagers who live in metropolitan areas with a large amount of cigarette price volatility have, on average, significantly lower levels of cigarette consumption. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis

February 2007

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287 Reads

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720 Citations

Journal of Political Economy

For industries ranging from software to pharmaceuticals and entertainment, there is an intense debate about the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property. The Internet provides a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection because it drastically lowers the cost of copying information. In this paper, we analyze whether file sharing has reduced the legal sales of music. While this question is receiving considerable attention in academia, industry, and Congress, we are the first to study the phenomenon employing data on actual downloads of music files. We match an extensive sample of downloads to U. S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, we instrument for downloads using data on international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our estimates are inconsistent


The Behavioral Dynamics of Youth Smoking

September 2005

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82 Reads

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47 Citations

The Journal of Human Resources

Individual smoking behavior persists over time, but is this repeated behavior attributed to past use or individual heterogeneity? Using longitudinal data on teens from all 50 United States from 1988 to 1992, we find a significant causal role for endogenous past cigarette consumption even after controlling extensively for observed and unobserved heterogeneity. We also find measurable evidence of different sensitivities to cigarette price depending on past use. These two findings suggest that a cigarette price increase will have a larger aggregate effect in the long run than in the short run as more individuals accumulate in the price-sensitive nonsmoking group.


TABLE 2 . AVERAGE DISTRICT SPENDING BY CATEGORY, 1995/96 -1997/98 (SAMPLE: DECENTRALIZED DISTRICTS WITH AVAILABLE WORKPLANS)
TABLE 4 . FIXED EFFECTS ORDINARY LEAST SQUARES ESTIMATIONS OF PUBLIC GOODS SPILLOVERS
Decentralisation and Government Provision of Public Goods: The Public Health Sector in Uganda
  • Article
  • Full-text available

February 2005

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944 Reads

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127 Citations

While many developing countries have devolved health care responsibilities to local governments in recent years, no study has examined whether decentralisation actually leads to greater health sector allocative efficiency. This paper approaches this question by modeling local government budgeting decisions under decentralisation. The model leads to conclusions not all favourable to decentralisation and produces several testable hypotheses concerning local government spending choices. For a brief empirical test of the model we look at data from Uganda. The data are of a type seldom available to researchers-actual local government budgets for the health sector in a developing country. The health budgets are disaggregated into specific types of activities based on a subjective characterisation of each activity's 'publicness'. The empirical results provide preliminary evidence that local government health planners are allocating declining proportions of their budgets to public goods activities.

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Citations (24)


... During World War II (WWII), a gigantic industrial arms build-up program in the US, initiated by President Roosevelt, became known as the 'Arsenal of Democracy' (Baime, 2014;Rhode et al., 2018). It helped and was initiated to outpace the war production of Germany, Italy, and Japan (the Axis Alliance) and assisted the Allies in winning the war. ...

Reference:

The arsenal of democracy? An examination of political regime types’ success in the global sporting arms race following the collapse of the iron curtain
The arsenal of democracy: Production and politics during WWII
  • Citing Article
  • October 2018

Journal of Public Economics

... Hence, it can be applied to market-driven or policy-driven changes in income or price in a variety of dynamic contexts, including addiction, habits, taste formation, and physical and mental health (see, e.g. Atkin 2013;Bronnenberg, Dubé, and Gentzkow 2012;Dalgaard and Strulik 2014;Darden, Gilleskie, and Strumpf 2018;Della Vigna and Malmendier 2006;Galama and Van Kippersluis 2019). ...

Smoking and Mortality: New Evidence from a Long Panel
  • Citing Article
  • March 2018

International Economic Review

... In recent years, companies have begun to invest in reaching potential customers via this medium (Craig, Flynn & Holody 2017). Simultaneously, the music industry has struggled to stabilize its revenue since the advent of digital streaming (Ruth 2019a;Wlömert & Papies 2016), compounded by losses resulting from the file-sharing era (Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf 2016). In response to this, both management companies and musicians themselves have begun to explore novel strategies to increase their revenue (Gloor 2014;Haynes & Marshall 2018). ...

The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales, Revisited
  • Citing Article
  • November 2016

Information Economics and Policy

... The pandemic provides an interesting setting to revisit this thorny issue. To empirically test the effect of illegal on legal consumption we rely on previous studies' methodology and regress the volume consumed legally on the volume purchased illegally, using an instrumental variable (IV) approach to address endogeneity issues (Rob & Waldfogel, 2006;Zentner, 2006;Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf, 2007). We instrument illegal consumption with the respondent's attitude towards various "victimless crimes" such as jaywalking, taking a flash photo in a museum and travelling on public transit without a ticket Ende et al., 2015). ...

The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis
  • Citing Article
  • February 2007

Journal of Political Economy

... Our measure of county status with respect to prohibition draws data from two separate studies that examined this question. Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee (1999) presented maps of county liquor status over the period 1935-70 (a corrected version of the maps is available in the online version of their paper (Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee, 2003), 3 while Frendreis and Tatalovich (2010) identified 262 "dry" counties in 2008. To assess change over time, the data for 2008 have to be comparable to the 1970 mapping of "dry" and "wet" counties. ...

Local Liquor Control from 1934 to 1970 *
  • Citing Article
  • January 2000

... However, findings on political issues have revealed a positive relationship with voting intention (see, Bauer, 2010). Improving on political issues of a country may mean the incumbent government is efficient and effective in improving the standard of living and welfare of the citizens (Elimder, 2010;Strumpf & Phillippe, 1999), which may subsequently lead to positive voting intention. Additionally, it has been found that political issues "may unequivocally create positive voting intention" Fiona, 1981). ...

Estimating Presidential Elections: The Importance of State Fixed Effects and the Role of National Versus Local Information
  • Citing Article
  • March 1999

Economics and Politics

... Several handbooks indicate that the intersection of music and economics is a well-researched area in cultural economics (e.g., Towse & Hernández, 2020;Waldfogel, 2019). Music has gained attention in the field of economics, particularly with the rise of digitization and services such as Napster, which have stimulated research on file sharing (Liebowitz, 2006;Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf, 2010;Waldfogel, 2012). However, more general aspects-such as the economics of music-related decision-making-have recently emerged as a distinct field of research (Anglada-Tort et al., 2023). ...

File Sharing and Copyright
  • Citing Article
  • January 2010

NBER/Innovation Policy and the Economy

... Most previous theoretical work focuses on quality. In these models, centralization allows the imposition of better policies, while decentralization aids in their discovery (e.g., Kollman et al., 2000;Strumpf, 2002;Volden et al., 2008;Cai and Treisman, 2009;Callander and Harstad, 2015;Cheng and Li, 2019). Our model suppresses uncertainty over the quality of policies and thus is more appropriate for settings like the Clean Air Act example, which had seemingly more to do with ideological conflict than policy failures. ...

Does Government Decentralization Increase Policy Innovation?
  • Citing Article
  • January 2002

Journal of Public Economic Theory

... Betting on sports has been around for centuries, with the first documented instance of gambling being by the Ancient Greeks almost 2000 years ago during the Olympic games [1]. Now, in modern times, sports gambling has evolved into a sophisticated market with thousands of people analyzing historical data to develop models that would maximize one's potential to win [2]. Sports gambling, in theory, has been identified as simple financial markets. ...

Why are Gambling Markets Organized so Differently than Financial Markets?
  • Citing Article
  • September 2003

Steven D Levitt

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Stefano Dellavigna

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Justin Wolfers