Social media data presents challenges for forecasters since one must convert text into data and deal with issues related to these measures being collected at different frequencies and volumes than traditional financial data. In this paper, we use a deep learning algorithm to measure sentiment...

We study the nature of peer effects in the market for new cell phones. Our analysis builds on de-identified data from Facebook that combine information on social networks with information on users' cell phone models. To identify peer effects, we use variation in friends' new phone acquisitions...

Three reasons are often cited for the value of corporate social responsibility: product quality signalling, delegated giving, and the halo effect. Previous tests cannot separate these channels because they focus on consumers, who value all three. We focus on prosecutors, who are only susceptible...

Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. For example, being inactive on social media can lead to social exclusion or not owning luxury brands can be associated with having a low social status. We show that, in the presence of such spillovers to...

Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries by conducting large-scale incentivized online...

Online sources sometimes publish information that is false or intentionally misleading. We study the role of social networks and advertising on social networks in the dissemination of false news stories about childhood vaccines. We document that anti-vaccine Facebook groups disseminate false...

Do online communities segregate into separate conversations about "contestable knowledge"? We analyze the contributors of biased and slanted content in Wikipedia articles about U.S. politics, and focus on two research questions: (1) Do contributors display tendencies to contribute to topics with...

In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but instead for consumer attention. We model and characterize how households allocate their scarce attention in arguably the largest market for attention: the Internet. Our characterization of household attention allocation operates...

We document that the recent house price experiences within an individual's social network affect her perceptions of the attractiveness of property investments, and through this channel have large effects on her housing market activity. Our data combine anonymized social network information from...

In this paper, we investigate political communications in social networks characterized both by homophily-a tendency to associate with similar individuals-and group size. To generate testable hypotheses, we develop a simple theory of information diffusion in social networks with homophily and...