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The Price of Media Capture and the Debasement of the French Newspaper Industry During the Interwar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2014

Vincent Bignon  and
Marc Flandreau
Vincent Bignon
Affiliation:
Economist, Bank of France and Affiliated Researcher, EconomiX – University Paris Nanterre. Banque de France, DGEI – DEMFI – Pomone (041-1422); 31, rue des Petits Champs, 75049 Paris Cedex 01 France. E-mail: vincent.bignon@banque-france.fr.
Marc Flandreau
Affiliation:
Economist, Bank of France and Affiliated Researcher, EconomiX – University Paris Nanterre. Banque de France, DGEI – DEMFI – Pomone (041-1422); 31, rue des Petits Champs, 75049 Paris Cedex 01 France. E-mail: vincent.bignon@banque-france.fr.
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Abstract

Measurement of the value of “media capture” (the control of newspapers by business or political interests) is difficult. However, if capture is valuable, it should affect the price of newspaper shares. Useful information about the value of media capture should be retrievable from Stock Exchange data. Interwar France provides a unique setting to implement this idea because key newspapers floated voting and nonvoting stocks. Combined with takeover prices, data yield estimates of the price of media capture and of the time-series evolution of this price. Comparison with Britain sheds new light on a dark episode of French history.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 799 - 830
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2014 

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Footnotes

The research on which this article is based was conducted when Bignon was a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute. The authors thank Gabriel Geisler Mesevage, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate Institute in Geneva for excellent research assistance. We thank Jean-Pierre Dormois for the Koestler quote and Muriel Petit-Konczyk for help with French financial data. We are grateful for comments from Olivier Accominotti, Francesco d'Acunto, Stefano Battilossi, Jordi Domènech, Leopoldo Ferguson, Christian Hellwig, André Liebig, Pilar Nogués-Marco, Jaime Reis, Albrecht Ritschl, Pierre Sicsic, François Velde as well as seminar participants at Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, February 2012, the 10th Media Workshop in Bogotá, October 2012, the London School of Economics, November 2012, the Paris School of Economics, December 2012, and the ISNIE conference in Florence, June 2013. We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their careful suggestions and insight. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Banque de France nor of the Eurosystem.

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