Information Economics and Policy最新文献

This study examines the effect of internet job search (IJS) on job-finding rates among unemployed job seekers during the rapid expansion of the internet from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s. To address endogenous selection into IJS, I use an instrumental variables (IV) strategy exploiting the rise of IJS within occupations over time, which varied across occupations depending on pre-internet exposure to computers at work. The analysis sample includes unemployed workers from the December 1998, August 2000, September 2001, October 2003, and July 2011 Current Population Survey (CPS) Computer and Internet Use Supplements and the September 1992 Basic Monthly CPS, longitudinally matched with their employment outcomes from the subsequent monthly CPS files. The IV estimates indicate that IJS increased the 15-month job-finding rate by 12.9 percentage points (25.1% relative to the mean). Results from placebo exercises and various specification checks support a causal interpretation of the estimated effects. Additionally, the effectiveness of IJS remained stable over time throughout the analysis period.

Facebook has been criticized for exposing its users to low-quality and harmful information, including fake news, hate speech, and politically one-sided content. In December 2013 and again in August 2014, the platform updated its news feed algorithm to increase user exposure to quality content of news publishers, while curbing the proliferation of non-informative posts. This paper uses a sample of German newspapers to investigate the conjecture that these modifications raised the incentives to publish quality news stories on the platform, focusing on the number and diversity of news story posts about substantive political issues. Using the newspapers’ print editions as a counterfactual, our results indicate an increase in the amount of substantive political news on Facebook by approximately 30%. This expansion occurred in a politically balanced way, except that the outlets disproportionately increased their Facebook coverage of the formerly underrepresented Linke (Left Party). Consequently, the within-outlet concentration of political viewpoints decreased by about one half of the standard deviation of our concentration indices.

This study presents investigation of the effects of vertical integration between an internet service provider (ISP) and a content provider (CP) on the ISP’s zero-rating choice and social welfare. We develop a simple model in which a monopolistic ISP delivers content from two CPs to a representative consumer. The ISP can offer zero-rating contracts to one or two CPs, thereby allowing the consumer to use zero-rated content without consuming monthly data usage. We investigate how integration between the ISP and a CP affects the ISP’s zero-rating choice and social welfare. Our findings are the following. First, the vertically integrated ISP might zero-rate the unaffiliated CP exclusively when the CPs’ profitability is not so low. Second, the integration increases the total surplus and the independent CP’s profit. Our results indicate that vertical integration is welfare enhancing and beneficial to the independent CP.

We use traffic data from around 5,000 web domains in Europe and United States to investigate the effect of the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on website visits and user engagement. We document an overall traffic reduction of approximately 15% in the long-run and find a measurable reduction in engagement with websites. Traffic from both paid and unpaid channels dropped significantly. We observe an inverted U-shaped relationship between website size and change in visits due to privacy regulation: the smallest and largest websites lost visitors, while medium-sized ones were less affected. Enforcement matters as well: The effects were amplified considerably in the long-run, following the first significant fine issued eight months after the entry into force of the GDPR. Exploring potential mechanisms, both a reduction in advertising effectiveness and a higher user awareness of privacy issues can explain our results.

This paper studies front-page choices made by editors of major US newspapers. I document that newspaper front pages are biased to certain combinations of news after controlling for the newspaper bias and the overall market coverage of such news. I also provide a reader-maximization model for front-page decisions that I use to interpret the empirical biases as preferences of the newspaper population of target readers. Through the lens of my model, my estimates recover maps of complementarities among pairs of topics for each newspaper and I find that these contribute to the probability that news on a topic appears on the front page.

Clean production and digitalization are the main directions of global manufacturing development under the new industrial revolution. Based on the application of digital technologies in enterprises caused by the smart city construction in China, this study adopts the difference-in-difference method to investigate the impact of digitalization and environmental regulation on total factor productivity. Using panel data on Chinese manufacturing listed enterprises from 2008 to 2019, this study finds that digitalization and environmental regulation can significantly improve the total factor productivity. It also shows that digitalization improves the total factor productivity of manufacturing enterprises by reducing transaction costs, facilitating servitization, and stimulating innovation investment. In addition, environmental regulation can force manufacturing enterprises to transform and improve their total factor productivity. However, the interaction between environmental regulation and digitalization has a significant negative impact on total factor productivity, implying that the paths of clean transformation and digitalization transformation is not coordinated. Our findings have implications for enacting effective policies to help manufacturing enterprises achieve digital transformation and clean production.

This paper analyzes behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD) in an asymmetric duopoly with switching costs and including both vertical and horizontal differentiation. We demonstrate that there are two configurations of market share in equilibrium. In the first configuration, where both firms poach their rival’s consumers, the equilibria arise when switching costs are low and the firms are relatively symmetric. In the second configuration, where only the firm with more supporting services poaches the rival’s consumers, the resulting equilibria reverse. We reveal the impact of switching costs on firm profits under BBPD as well as under uniform pricing and show that with either high switching costs or sufficiently large firm asymmetries, BBPD may benefit both firms. Moreover, we find that in the second market configuration, social welfare can be higher with BBPD than with uniform pricing under high switching costs and large firm asymmetries. We also reach the same conclusion regarding social welfare when consumers are myopic in the first market configuration.

Proponents of Net Neutrality rules argue that these regulations prevent internet service providers (ISP) from slowing down content that competes with some of their own services (vertical foreclosure). To study these incentives, we measure consumers’ willingness to pay for speed on the video on-demand market. We use a survey experiment to estimate a differentiated-product demand system for choosing how to view specific content. We establish a necessary condition for ISPs to have an incentive for vertical foreclosure: consumers respond to reduced speeds by substituting to a service offered by the ISP. We also show that by eliminating vertical foreclosure, Net Neutrality could provide incentives for ISPs to compete on prices.

In the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), people have been requested to work from home with information and communication technology (ICT) tools, i.e. telework. This paper investigates which factors (infection of COVID-19, individual characteristics, task characteristics, and working environments) are associated with telework use in Japan. Using the unique panel survey on telework, our estimation finds that although telework use remains low in Japan, educated, high ICT-skilled, younger, and female workers who engage in less teamwork and less routine tasks tend to use telework. Working environments such as the richness of IT communication tools, digitalized offices, and flexible-hour working systems are all positively correlated with telework use.

This study analyzes the effect of local Internet speed infrastructure (backhaul) on educational outcomes. In 2008, the Brazilian government implemented an Internet expansion policy that brought broadband to more than 3000 municipalities. The policy was designed with implementation criteria that make it a natural experiment that can be investigated through a regression discontinuity design (RDD). The results suggest worsening proficiency, higher dropout and retention among students from municipalities served by more powerful backhauls, i.e., capable of supporting higher connection speeds over fiberoptic lines. These results are paralleled in the empirical literature, which predominantly indicates negative or neutral effects of Internet access on education. This study demonstrates the need for a deeper reflection on the domestic use of the Internet and its consequences on educational outcomes of school-age children and adolescents.