Cross-ownership in Finnish Newspaper Publishing: World Media Economics and Management Conference, Cape Town

Cross-ownership and common ownership have gained more attention sincethe Millennium. It has been shown that the effects of cross ownership can beincorporated into standard game theoretical models, altering the traditionalconcentration measures and hence also the relationship between concentrationand profitability. Empirical research on the effect of cross ownership on concentrationis limited. This paper compares the traditional concentration index with theone modified for cross-ownership in the Finnish newspaper publishing industry, whichis characterized by cross-ownership that should be reflected in the modifiedempirical concentration measures. With a dataset that covers all daily newspaperpublishers between years 1950 and 2016 we show that this is indeed the case.Elaborating on the implications for industry concentration and profitability,we observe that the modified concentration indexes show a higher/lowercorrelation with the profitability in Finnish newspaper industry