Research

This paper investigates the trade-off agents face when providing information to potential matches in two-sided markets. Specifically, we explore how, in online labor markets, market congestion can lead to under-provision of information from global workers to employers and ultimately negatively impact match efficiency. We develop a model of equilibrium information provision characterized by attention-constrained employers and workers who provide match-specific costly information to their potential employers. The model shows that congestion forms a binding attention constraint, leading to under-provision of signaling effort by workers in equilibrium. We then provide empirical evidence from a major international task-based online labor market that supports our theoretical model, showing that congestion leads to hasty and generic job applications and that the market is characterized by low job-filling rates. Our model and setting lay the groundwork needed to quantify the loss of efficiency that arises due to information under-provision in congested markets.

Enforcement of quality regulations in the North may decrease the quality of goods distributed to the South, due to global redistribution by manufacturers of products flagged as "sub-quality" (products being recalled in the North) to less regulated markets. This paper aims to understand the global distribution of products recalled in highly regulated markets, such as the United States and Europe, when the manufacturers are global firms. Are new global manufacturing forces differentially allocating their products based on differentials in regulatory enforcement among destination markets? To answer these questions, I digitized new U.S. data on pharmaceutical product recalls and warning letters to foreign manufacturing facilities, which I merge with detailed descriptions extracted from Indian customs manifests. Using text mining techniques, I am able to trace global exports of drug products from Indian drug manufacturers and study what happens to global exports after an Indian product is recalled in the U.S. After a recall, I find evidence that the manufacturing firm reduces sales in the U.S., and reallocates production to other (less regulated) markets, such as African and South-Asian markets. Such behavior may result in an equilibrium in which high-quality products are traded with the North and sub-optimal quality products are diverted to the South. This may have important policy implications if more stringent quality enforcement in the North widens the differential in regulatory standards with the South. Abilities for global manufacturers to arbitrage exports based on differentials in global regulatory standards may lead to more product differentiation, resulting in lower-quality batches of products being sent to South countries with less regulated markets. This may also have implications for product availability in the North, as suppliers now located in the South may have lower incentives to quickly correct manufacturing quality issues if they can still distribute these products to South markets.

This paper provides a first empirical study of how openness to international trade in news products, a phenomenon largely facilitated by the digitalization of newspapers, may impact the characteristics of the information products available to consumers. Based on a case study of the entry of French media firms in Francophone Africa, I build a new dataset of more than 800 000 newspaper articles over the period 2005 to 2017. Using text mining techniques, I construct a five-dimensional set of newspaper characteristics to qualitatively analyze newspaper data. My evidence suggests that the entry of French digital newspapers, which produce a relatively low share of local news and whose websites are generally uniformly targeting all Francophone African countries, lead to a significant decrease of the diversity of subjects treated by Francophone African newspapers, characterized by a strong and significant increase of the share of local news, and a small decrease of the total number of articles related to France. I also find a slight but significant impact of the penetration of French digital newspapers on two indicators of newspaper format, namely a small increase of the average frequency of publication of Francophone African newspapers, and a very small decrease of the mean wordcount per articles. 

We study the role of newspapers in the migration decisions of rural individuals in the 1870-1940 United States. Contributing to the urban and health economics literature, we offer new insights about how information, specifically newspaper portrayals of public health advancements like water filtration and sewage systems, shapes rural-urban migration patterns. We show that access to information about urban health conditions through newspapers played a crucial role in encouraging rural individuals to move to cities over the turn of the 20th century.

By exploiting a novel linkage between full-count U.S. census data and a unique historical newspaper dataset at the county level, which leverages text-mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms, we provide novel evidence that rural individuals responded to newspaper narratives on public health investments and disease occurrences. Rural migrants with access to information about public health investments migrated in higher proportion to sanitation-adopting cities compared to rural migrants with no access to such information, and avoided cities affected by pandemics more than their non-informed counterparts. This finding is consistent with the literature suggesting that such investments significantly reduced mortality from waterborne diseases (typhoid and diphtheria) and improved quality of life, making cities more attractive places to live.

As policymakers consider strategies to revitalize urban areas in the post-pandemic era, our study highlights the potential importance of information dissemination in promoting urban growth and development.