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Competition among digital services: Evidence from the 2021 meta outage
Get PDFOn October 4, 2021, all services provided by Meta Platforms, Inc. (then Facebook, Inc.) became unavailable unexpectedly for all its worldwide users for a period of about six hours. We use detailed high‐frequency tracking data from smartphones, tablets and desktop computers of thousands of Meta users from Spain and the United States to study their behavioral responses during the outage. We find (1) the strongest substitution occurs within social media and messaging services, (2) evidence of substitution across service categories, (3) substitution patterns that vary across demographic groups, (4) substantially higher substitution rates among multi‐homers, (5) substitution rates that increase over the course of the outage, (6) distinct differences in substitution patterns between countries, and (7) increased usage of non‐Meta digital services after the outage. To our knowledge, this study presents the first comprehensive revealed‐preference analysis of substitution patterns when an entire user population simultaneously seeks alternatives to major digital service
Autonomie als eigene und gemeinsame Selbstgesetzgebung: Zum Verhältnis von Moral, Recht und Politik bei Kant
No full textDer Beitrag legt dar, dass Kants späte Ausführungen zu Recht und Politik in der Metaphysik der Sitten wesentlich durch seine Vorstellung der Autonomie des Menschen geprägt sind. In einem ersten Schritt wird Kants Konzeption einer Moral der Autonomie in Grundzügen vorgestellt und Kants Rechtsverständnis im Rahmen dieser Moralkonzeption verortet und die Vereinbarkeit rechtlicher Zwangsbefugnis mit der Autonomie des Subjekts aufgezeigt. Im zweiten Schritt wird Kants autonomietheoretisches Argument für die rechtliche Notwendigkeit des Staates als Zustand der Verwirklichung des allgemein vereinigten Willens präsentiert. Schließlich wird gezeigt, dass das kantische Vernunftrecht mit der Forderung nach der Errichtung einer Republik einhergeht, die die Form einer rechtsstaatlich organisierten Demokratie aufweist. Es ist die Aufgabe der Politik, den Staat auf dem Weg der Reform zur Übereinstimmung mit der Forderung des Rechts zu bringen
The long-run effects of Conditional Cash Transfers : the case of Bolsa Familia in Brazil
Get PDFConditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have become a key antipoverty policy in Latin America in the last 25 years. The ultimate goal of this kind of programs is to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty through the promotion of human capital accumulation of children in vulnerable households. In this paper, we explore this issue by estimating the long-run effects of the largest CCT in Latin America: the Brazilian Bolsa Familia. Through a combination of the two-stage-two-sample method and a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence consistent with a positive long-run impact of Bolsa Familia among former beneficiaries. In particular, we find a significant positive effect on education and labor income, and a negative effect on the likelihood of being a current beneficiary of this social transfer
A KISS for central bank communication in times of high inflation
Get PDFDuring the post-pandemic inflation surge, many central banks actively used communication about the inflation outlook as a policy tool to limit spillovers from realized to expected inflation. We present novel survey evidence showing that the ECB's guidance about the projected inflation path substantially lowers households' inflation expectations in times of unusually high inflation. A reassuring, positively framed non-quantitative communication style has the largest treatment effects on short-term expected inflation. Providing simple visualizations of the ECB's projected inflation path also significantly lowered inflation expectations across horizons. We document substantial heterogeneity of these effects along key socio-demographic characteristics. Our findings suggest that, regarding their communication, central banks should 'keep it sophisticatedly simple (KISS)'
Confirmation and compensation: extending the socio-cognitive perspective on workforce downsizing
No full textNarratives about fiscal policy: Are firm decision-makers’ tax preferences driven by redistribution or fiscal consolidation motives?
Get PDFMotivated by the increasing frequency with which business leaders publicly express their views on policy issues and by recent findings on the role of narratives in shaping preferences and behaviors, we investigate ow narratives affect the tax preferences of firm decision-makers. Specifically, using a large-scale survey experiment (N=7,848), we examine how exposure to narratives of redistribution and fiscal consolidation affects firm decision-makers’ attitudes toward taxes and fiscal stimulus. We find that framing taxes as payments of due debts increases the preference to pay taxes, whereas framing taxes as funds required to cover undue losses is largely ineffective, except for a notable tendency to favor raising the capital gains tax. We also observe a greater preference to pay taxes when decision-makers agree with the stimulus. Our findings on narratives and the channels affecting tax preferences have implications for fiscal policy communicatio
