This paper presents market-based evidence that President Trump influences expectations about monetary policy. We use tick-by-tick fed funds futures data and a collection of Trump tweets criticizing the conduct of monetary policy and consistently advocating that the Fed lower interest rates....

Much debate exists around the impact that illegal file sharing may have on the creative industries. Similarly, opinions differ regarding whether the producers of artistic works should be forced to accept any weakening of intellectual property rights resulting from illegal file sharing, or if...

We examine whether changes in the local school choice environment affect the amount of information parents collect about local school quality, using data on over 100 million searches from greatschools.org. We link monthly data on search frequency in local “Search Units” to information on...

Blockchain technology provides decentralized consensus and potentially enlarges the contracting space using smart contracts with tamper-proofness and algorithmic executions. Meanwhile, generating decentralized consensus entails distributing information which necessarily alters the informational...

A bona fide currency functions as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account, but bitcoin largely fails to satisfy these criteria. Bitcoin has achieved only scant consumer transaction volume, with an average well below one daily transaction for the few merchants who accept it....

We use aggregated data from Facebook to show that COVID-19 was more likely to spread between regions with stronger social network connections. Areas with more social ties to two early COVID-19 “hotspots” (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally had more...

We introduce a new measure of social connectedness between U.S. county-pairs, as well as between U.S. counties and foreign countries. Our measure, which we call the "Social Connectedness Index" (SCI), is based on the number of friendship links on Facebook, the world's largest online social...

We use 633 days of tweets about the Euro/dollar exchange rate to determine their information content and the profitability of trading based on Twitter Sentiment. We develop a detailed lexicon used by FX traders to translate verbal tweets into positive, negative and neutral opinions. The...