Globalization

Does mobile Internet arrival affect individuals’ voting behavior in developing countries? I provide an empirical answer to this question looking at the South African municipal elections results between 2000 and 2016. I exploit the temporal and geographical variation in 3G Internet coverage to estimate its impact on (1) the vote shares of the major parties,(2) voter turnout, (3) electoral competition and (4) protests.

We show that dealer market power impedes the pass-through of monetary policy in repo markets, which is an important first stage of monetary policy transmission. In the European repo market, most participants do not have access to trade on centralized exchanges. Rather, they rely on OTC intermediation by a small number of dealers that exhibit significant market power. As a result, the passthrough of the ECB's policy rate to repo markets is inefficient and unequal.

The chapter proposes an ‘open video system’ to deal with digital dominance in the online streaming video sector. TV, in its third generation, is becoming online-based and, due to the fundamental technology and economics of the medium, controlled by a few global platforms. The extent is shown by market concentration numbers developed in the chapter. How to deal with this problem? Instead of following the breakup or public utility models, the chapter advocates the enablement of information intermediaries that would act on behalf of consumers.

This article empirically examines the magnitude of risk premiums for direct real estate investments on a global basis. As this article analyzes ex-ante risk premiums over more than 25 years consistently across the world, it enhances current knowledge about the regional differences between risk premiums and helps long-term investors with their global portfolio allocation over time. On a global level, the authors find a risk premium of 4.1% for Gordon’s growth and 3.7% for two-stage growth model. The periodic growth model shows a slightly lower risk premium of 3.1%.

This study uses advanced natural language processing methods to identify companies that are aligned with the UN SDGs based on the text in their sustainability disclosures. Using CSR reports of Russel 1000 companies between 2010-2019 we apply a logistic classifier, support vector machines (SVM) and a fully-connected neural network to predict alignment with the SDGs. Specifically, we use word embeddings to augment dictionary-based input features as well as use the embeddings as features themselves based on Word2Vec and Doc2Vec models to classify companies’ alignment with the SDGs over time.

This paper studies systemic risk in the interbank market. We first establish that in the German interbank lending market, a few large banks intermediate funding flows between many smaller periphery banks. We then develop a network model in which banks trade off the costs and benefits of link formation to explain these patterns. The model is structurally estimated using banks' preferences as revealed by the observed network structure before the 2008 financial crisis.

In this paper, we examine a novel two-stage mechanism for selling government securities, wherein the dealers underwrite in the first stage the sale of securities, which are auctioned in stage 2 via either a discriminatory auction (DA) or a uniform price auction (UPA).

Along with its interrelated companion volume, The Technology, Business, and Economics of Streaming Video, this book examines the next generation of TV—online video. It reviews the elements that lead to online platforms and video clouds and analyzes the software and hardware elements of content creation and interaction, and how these elements lead to different styles of video content.