Media

As colleges and universities settle back into the traditional face-to-face modality of classes, the many platforms, apps, online tools, and learning management systems adopted during the pandemic have become a regular part of the classroom. Moving course materials online, teaching synchronous or asynchronous online classes and making use of a myriad of web-based systems became the norm for the past couple of years. As campuses transitioned from fully online or hybrid back to face-to-face or in-person classes, some elements of the transition have not been so smooth.

This paper experimentally tests the effectiveness of two short edutainment campaigns (under 25 minutes) delivered through Facebook Messenger at reshaping gender norms and reducing social acceptability of violence against women (VAW) in India. Participants were randomly assigned to watch video-clips with implicit or explicit messaging formats (respectively a humorous fake reality TV drama or a docu-series with clear calls to action).

As financial technology improves and data becomes more abundant, do market prices reflect this growing information and allocate capital more efficiently? While a number of recent studies have documented rises in aggregate price efficiency, we show that there are large cross-sectional differences. The previously-documented increases are driven by a rise in the informativeness of large, growth stocks. The informational efficiency of smaller assets' prices or prices of assets with less growth potential are either flat or declining.

How does the internet affect young people's mental health? We study this question in the context of Italy using administrative data on the universe of cases of mental disorders diagnosed in Italian hospitals between 2001 and 2013, which we combine with information on the availability of high-speed internet at the municipal level. Our identification strategy exploits differences in the proximity of municipalities to the pre-existing voice telecommunication infrastructure, which was previously irrelevant but became salient after the advent of the internet.

An important challenge for many firms is to identify the life transitions of its customers, such as job searching, expecting a child, or purchasing a home. Inferring such transitions, which are generally unobserved to the firm, can offer the firms opportunities to be more relevant to their customers. In this paper, we demonstrate how a social network platform can leverage its longitudinal user data to identify which of its users are likely to be job seekers. Identifying job seekers is at the heart of the business model of professional social network platforms.

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.

Smartphones have made it nearly effortless to share images of branded experiences. This research classifies social media brand imagery and studies user response. Aside from packshots (standalone product images), two types of brand-related selfie images appear online: consumer selfies (featuring brands and consumers’ faces) and an emerging phenomenon the authors term “brand selfies” (invisible consumers holding a branded product).

Many think that they understand the secrets to the success of the biggest tech companies: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. It's the platform economy, or network effects, or some other magical power that makes their ultimate world domination inevitable. Investment banker and professor Jonathan Knee argues that the truth is much more complicated--but entrepreneurs and investors can understand what makes the giants work, and learn the keys to lasting success in the digital economy.

We develop a dynamic model of platform economy where tokens serve as a means of payments among platform users and are issued to finance investment in platform productivity. Tokens are optimally issued to reward platform owners when the productivity-normalized token supply is low and burnt to boost the franchise value when the productivity-normalized normalized supply is high.