End of the English (British?) Empire? Or Something Else?

The paper analyzes best-seller lists in seven major European book markets between April 2008 and March 2009. The paper’s authors introduce the concept of an impact factor for best-selling authors that shows how influential an author is in a given market and across the analyzed markets overall. The paper’s authors discovered that a new generation of European best-selling authors appeared in major book markets of Europe such that those not writing in English have an impact of almost twice that of the English writers. Furthermore, the authors have discovered that only veteran English or American best-selling authors tend to be published by big media conglomerates; the majority of the European best-selling authors were published by a surprising mix of big and small, independent and international publishing houses. It is striking that English as the most popular second language in the world did not play a stronger role as an intermediary language in the transmission of books from one European culture to another, as European publishers in major markets still employ editors who read a variety of languages and thus play the role of intermediaries in how books travel from one culture to another.     

Visual autocorrelation of prices

Paintings are in essence about visual features of varying significance from which differences in their market prices originate. Studies normally investigate derivative sources of painting price determinants, which is reasonably understandable because the appreciation of an image is quite subjective. This paper provides an operational solution to the quantification of paintings based on a new concept termed as “visual autocorrelation” of prices (VAP). Considering the current empirical framework of spatial and temporal autocorrelation of prices, and using data on the paintings of two abstract expressionist artists, empirical results support the coherence of the VAP concept.     

What’s the value of an acceptance letter? Using admissions data to estimate the return to college

This paper exploits discontinuities and randomness in the college admissions in Sweden in 1982, to estimate the economic return to college in the 1990s. At the time, college admissions were highly selective and applicants were ranked with respect to their formal merits. Admissions were given to those ranked higher than some threshold value. At the margin, applicants were sometimes randomly assigned to college. Exploiting this Regression-Discontinuity design, individuals who were admitted in 1982 are estimated to have about 0.20 years longer college education in 1996. However, the earnings effects for applicants at the margin of admission are insignificant. Controlling for the college admission determinants, the OLS-estimates of the return to college is 1.4 percent in 1991–96. The IV-estimates are not significantly different from the OLS counterparts.     

Entwicklung gro?er Systeme mit generischen Methoden – Eine übersicht über den Sonderforschungsbereich 501

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