We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to...

Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. It has been thought since the time of Adam Smith that a firm's internal structure affects its productivity through the channel of gains from specialization. Our paper...

Organization theorists identify organizational social capital as one of the primary building blocks of a potentially powerful resource for improving organizational performance. However, little is known about the impact of the socio-emotional skills of the employees within their social capital...

The current economic crisis requires fast information to predict economic behavior early, which is difficult at times of structural changes. This paper suggests an innovative new method of using data on internet activity for that purpose. It demonstrates strong correlations between keyword...

How do employers attract the right workers? How important are posted wages vs. other job characteristics? Using data from the leading job board CareerBuilder.com, we show that most vacancies do not post wages, and, for those that do, job titles explain more than 90% of the wage variance. Job...

Can digital labour market platforms reduce search frictions in formal or informal labour markets? We study this question using a randomized experiment embedded in a tracer study of the work transitions of graduates from technical and vocational colleges in Mozambique. We implement an...

The increasing use of online labour platforms as intermediaries for finding work - known as crowdwork or gig work - is a new form of 'hybrid' (solo)self-employment that hinges on the borders of dependent and self-employment. In this study we use a novel international dataset of online platform...

This paper investigates the link between product quality and price setting for central processing units (CPUs). Using thousands of price quotes from a popular price-comparison website, we find that market fundamentals, such as the number of sellers, median price, share of convenient prices and...

In the past few decades, technological progress has led to the digitization and digitalization of economies into what one could now call digital economies. The COVID-19 pandemic will accelerate the development of the digital economy. In a digital economy, digital entrepreneurs pursue...

In this paper, we compare wages and labor market conditions of individuals engaged in online platform work and in traditional occupations by exploiting individual-level survey data on crowdworkers belonging to the largest micro-task marketplaces, focusing on evidence from the United States and...