Various forms of social learning and network effects are at work on crowdfunding platforms, giving rise to informational and payoff externalities. We use novel entrepreneur-backer data to study how these externalities shape funding dynamics, within and across projects. We find that backers...

Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a...

Recent disruptions to global value chains (GVCs) have raised an important question: Can decoupling from GVCs increase a country’s welfare by reducing its exposure to foreign supply shocks? We use a quantitative trade model to simulate GVCs decoupling, defined as increased barriers to global...

In early 2020, the disease Covid-19 caused a drastic lockdown of the Chinese economy. We use a quantitative trade model with input-output linkages to gauge the effects of this adverse supply shock in China on the global economy through international trade and global value chains (GVCs). We find...

Over the period 2015-2017, the five giant technologically leading firms, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) acquired 175 companies, from small start-ups to billion dollar deals. By investigating this intense M&A, this paper ambitions a better understanding of the Big Five's...

This paper scrutinizes the effects of the European Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market on platform competition in media markets. Platforms that are Online Content-Sharing Service Providers must have a license agreement with collective management organizations that control the...

Intellectual property rights are fundamental to how economies organize innovation and steer the diffusion of knowledge. Copyright law, in particular, has developed constantly to keep up with emerging technologies and the interests of creators, consumers, and intermediaries of the different...

This paper studies the social and economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in a large sample of countries. I stress, in particular, the importance of countries' interconnections to un-derstand the spread of the virus. I estimate a Global VAR model and exploit a dataset on existing social...

We examine the effect of internet diffusion on the uptake of an important public health intervention: the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. We study England between 2000 and 2011 when internet diffusion spread rapidly and there was a high profile medical article (falsely) linking the MMR...

We analyze a large-scale survey of owners, managers, and employees of small businesses in the United States to understand the effects of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic on those businesses. The survey was fielded in late April 2020 among Facebook business page administrators, frequent...