On November 21 Tommaso Valletti, professor at Imperial College London and professor II at NHH/BECCLE will hold a seminar about regulation in the book market. A few years ago Italy allowed for fixed book prices, where publishers set prices in the book stores. In this seminar Tommaso Valletti will use a detailed data set to present evidence on how such a regulation affected book variety and prices.

This is a joint seminar with CBE (Center for Business Economics) at NHH.

The seminar will not be streamed.

Professor Valetti has co-authored an article on the subject. The abstract of the article is as following:

Fixed book price (FBP) agreements are a form of resale price maintenance commonly applied to books in various countries. FBP restricts retail price competition with the aim of promoting book production variety. Yet, despite its popularity and application in many countries, there is no empirical evidence on its effects. We offer systematic evidence on the impact of FBP on book variety and prices using a detailed new dataset from Italy that includes the universe of books published and bought, before and after the introduction of FBP. Our results indicate that FBP raises prices without significantly affecting the number of new books published in the marketplace. However, it also increases considerably the variety of books actually bought, especially from independent bookstores.  We estimate a structural model of demand that accounts for both effects, finding that consumers overall benefited from the regulation

Place: Department of Economics at NHH, Room E209

Time: Tuesday November 21 at 12.15-13.30