Culture & Society

In recent research, Pablo Balán, Agustín Vallejo, and Pablo M. Pinto examine how diversity affects cooperation between neighbors after a natural disaster. They find that more diverse neighborhoods were less likely to cooperate with each other on recovery efforts after Hurricane Harvey.

In the second of two articles, Stavros Makris and Filip Lubinski discuss how governments can reimagine competition policy to protect democracy and citizen welfare without abandoning traditional consumer welfare goals like innovation.

In the first of two articles, Stavros Makris and Filip Lubinski discuss the connection between economic competition and democracy and how competition law allowed Big Tech to undermine both.

Online degrees are reshaping higher education by lowering tuition prices and reducing in-person program availability. In new research, Nano Barahona, Cauê Dobbin, and Sebastián Otero find that Brazil’s high online enrollment benefits those who need cheaper and more flexible options, but ultimately hurts young undergraduate students who are shifting away from higher-value in-person education options.

Smartphones have become a primary gateway for consuming political news, but we know little about what individuals actually see on their phones. In new research, Guy Aridor, Tevel Dekel, Rafael Jiménez Durán, Ro’ee Levy, and Lena Song open the smartphone black box using novel content data and document individuals’ exposure to election-related content during the 2024 presidential election, as well as the drivers of this exposure.

In new research, Mario Amore, Morten Bennedsen, Birthe Larsen, and Zeyu Zhao examine the symbiotic relationship between working environments and employee well-being, finding that when workers are safe and satisfied, companies profit.

Mihir Kshirsagar argues that the evidence presented in FTC v. Meta shows that discussions about the application of First Amendment protections to social media must go beyond the binary set in Moody v. NetChoice between treating them as common carriers or editorial agents. Rather, a commercial conduct framework is needed to understand how speech operates on platforms designed to maximize user attention and ad revenue.

In a new NBER working paper, Charles Hodgson and Shilong Sun show that vertical integration is usually good for consumers, except when firms have both the ability and the incentive to foreclose rivals.  They use the heavily integrated Chinese Film Industry to show that targeting enforcement to the markets where harm is predictable makes it possible to effectively regulate harmful cases and protect consumers.

In new research, Seda Basihos investigates the relationship between a decline in market competition and global democratic backsliding. She finds that market concentration leads to increasing political power for giant firms—a trend that ultimately erodes democracy levels.

In new research, Riley Acton, Emily Cook, and Paola Ugalde find that college campuses in the United States have become increasingly polarized over the last few decades, and both liberals and conservatives are willing to pay much more to attend colleges with likeminded peers.