Exposure to foreign media and changes in cultural traits: Evidence from naming patterns in France

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Disdier, Anne-Celia; Head, Keith; Mayer, Thierry
• 署名单位: University of British Columbia; AgroParisTech; Universite Paris Saclay; INRAE; Institut d'Etudes Politiques Paris (Sciences Po); Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2009.12.001
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 226-238
• 关键词: Endogenous tastes; cultural transmission; television; Cinema; Popular music

摘要

Free trade in audio-visual services has faced opposition on the grounds that foreign media undermine domestic culture, and ultimately, global diversity Using a long panel of French birth registries, we assess the media-culture link using name frequencies as a measure of tastes Controlling for the number of people who currently have a name and unobserved name effects, our regressions show that media influences choices via selective imitation Parents are much more likely to adopt media names that they associate with youth Using estimated parameters, we simulate our model of name choice to reveal that, absent foreign media, fewer than 5% of French babies would have been named differently Our simulations also suggest a positive effect of foreign media on the welfare of parents (C) 2009 Elsevier B V All rights reserved