Working Papers

  • Data, Privacy Laws and Firm Production: Evidence from GDPR
    with Mert Demirer, Dean Li, Sida Peng, 2024
    ‍

    By regulating how firms collect, store, and use data, privacy laws may change the role of data in production and alter firm demand for information technology inputs. We study how firms respond to privacy laws in the context of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by using seven years of data from a large global cloud-computing provider. Our difference-in-difference estimates indicate that, in response to the GDPR, EU firms decreased data storage by 26% and data processing by 15% relative to comparable US firms, becoming less "data-intensive." To estimate the costs of the GDPR for firms, we propose and estimate a production function where data and computation serve as inputs to the production of "information." We find that data and computation are strong complements in production and that firm responses are consistent with the GDPR representing a 20% increase in the cost of data on average. Variation in the firm-level effects of the GDPR and industry-level exposure to data, however, drives significant heterogeneity in our estimates of the impact of the GDPR on production costs.

  • Contract Terms, Employment Shocks, and Default in Credit Cards
    with Sara G. Castellanos, Aprajit Mahajan, Eduardo Alcaraz Prous, Enrique Seira, 2023
    Revise & Resubmit, Review of Economic Studies
    ‍

    The tension between limiting default rates and expanding financial access in developing countries is particularly acute for credit card borrowing, which is increasingly how borrowers access formal credit. Concerns over high default rates have led to contract-term restrictions such as higher minimum payments and interest rate ceilings, despite limited evidence on their effectiveness. We use a nationwide RCT to study new borrower responses to large experimental contract-term changes for a card that accounted for 15% of all first-time formal loans in Mexico. We find default is high and unresponsive to even large interest rate declines for the newest borrowers, and that a doubling of the required minimum payment does not reduce default. Matching the experimental subjects to their administrative employment histories, we find that unemployment shocks are common for newer borrowers and that plausibly exogenous job separation shocks have large effects on default.

  • Should The Government Sell You Goods? Evidence from the Milk Market in Mexico
    with Enrique Seira, 2022
    ‍
    Covered at voxdev.org
    Winner of the 2020 Citibanamex Prize in Economic Research

    Governments spend considerable resources providing goods directly. We show that such behavior may increase welfare when private suppliers have market power. We do this by studying the staggered rollout of hundreds of government milk "ration stores" in Mexico using a proprietary panel of household food purchases. The rollout lowered the price per liter of privately supplied milk by 2.4% and increased household consumption. To compare direct provision with budget-neutral alternatives, we develop and estimate an equilibrium model of the market that accounts for quality differences. Direct provision generates larger consumer surplus than milk vouchers and unrestricted cash transfers.


Publications

  • Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving Beyond “Free”
    with Imanol Arrieta Ibarra, Len Goff, Jaron Lanier, E. Glen Weyl, 2018
    AEA Papers and Proceedings
    ‍

    In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capital created by corporations observing willing individuals. This neglects users' role in creating data, reducing incentives for users, distributing the gains from the data economy unequally and stoking fears of automation. Instead treating data (at least partially) as labor could help resolve these issues and restore a functioning market for user contributions, but may run against the near-term interests of dominant data monopsonists who have benefited from data being treated as ''free''. Countervailing power, in the form of competition, a data labor movement and/or thoughtful regulation could help restore balance.


Research in Progress

(send me an email for an early draft / slides / thoughts / questions)

  • Currency Depreciations and Savings Behavior: Evidence from Household Deposits in Armenia
    with Joshua Kim, Aleksandr Shirkhanyan  
    ‍

  • Trade, Market Structure, and Household Welfare: Evidence from Colombian Tariff-Quotas
    with Mayara Felix, Jorge Florez-Acosta, Kasper Vrolijk  
    ‍

plus some other research projects!