Does Facebook make people lonely and unhappy? Empirical studies have produced conflicting results about the effect of social networking sites (SNS) use on individual welfare. We use a representative sample of the Italian population to investigate how actual and virtual networks of social...

This paper presents a review of empirical methods used to assess the behavioral, economic, and political outcomes of Internet and social media usage. Instead of merely surveying the various impacts of the Internet, we examine the methods adopted to identify these impacts. We describe two main...

We examine the long-run effect of homophily in online social networks on interpersonal interactions in local communities. We measure online homophily across counties in the US using Facebook data. For identification, we exploit a conflict between Facebook and Google over data sharing of user...