Internet exposure during adolescence and age at first marriage

The expansion of the internet has provided people with more channels to obtain information. New information about the world and other lifestyles provided by the internet may affect teenagers’ attitudes and change their behavior of first marriage in adulthood. Using data from China Family Panel Studies, this paper explores a national policy reform of the internet in 2000 and combines a difference-in-difference framework with a discrete-time hazard model to estimate the impact of internet exposure in adolescence on women’s age at first marriage. The results show that internet exposure during adolescence significantly reduces the risk of women’s age at first marriage. No change is observed in men of similar age. Further analysis of the mechanism shows that women’s education or search costs in the marriage market cannot explain the findings. In contrast, women’s traditional attitudes toward gender roles vary with internet exposure. Their gender role attitudes become more egalitarian, and their attitudes toward marriage become more open. Exposure to the internet also makes women even more reluctant to enter marriage, an institution that is increasingly differentiated by traditional gender roles.     

内外部冲击下中国股市网络的动态演化和 稳健性分析

股市的平稳运行是实现金融发展、金融稳定和金融安全的重要一环。文章基于复杂网络理论,以2015年股灾和2018年中美贸易战为背景,分别构建不同时期中国股市的MST网络,探索在不同类型冲击下我国股市网络的结构特征,将最小生成树方法和滑动分析相结合,研究我国股市网络动态演化的时变特征和稳健性。结果表明,不同时期股市网络MST结构变化较大;不同时期网络节点的度分布均服从幂律分布,且中心性节点在冲击发生前,集中出现在工业领域,而冲击中、后期则更多地出现在金融领域;股市网络连通性和稳健性会因为冲击类型不同而出现差别,内部冲击(2015年股灾)会降低同行业连接边数,而外部冲击(中美贸易战)则会增加同行业连接边数,且前者比后者对股市网络结构的影响更大,市场对于内部冲击的抵御能力更弱;虽然内外部冲击短期内对网络连接的稳健性冲击不大,但从长期看,网络连接的存活率会急剧下降,网络结构稳健性随时间变化而减弱。     

Rapid internationalization and exit of exporters: The role of digital platforms

Digital platforms have been developing fast which transform the benefits and costs of rapid internationalization of firms on them. Employing transaction cost economics perspective, we argue that the transaction attributes of asset specificity, transaction uncertainty, and transaction frequency, have all changed fundamentally in digital platform-based transactions. They render the organizational learning in rapid Internet exporting to counterbalance the diseconomies of time compression caused by the lack of organizational absorptive capacity. By using the three attributes as underlying mechanisms, we hypothesize that the expansion speed of exporters on digital platforms reduces exit hazards of the exporters. We further hypothesize that digital signals on product quality strengthen the main effect. As for digital infrastructure, we recognize its competing effects and make curvilinear moderating hypotheses. Survival analyses based on 353,636 entries of real transaction records from a digital exporting platform have provided robust findings. This study highlights the importance of examining how the digital platform reshapes the transaction attributes and internationalization-performance relationship.     

The effect of overspending on tariff choices and customer churn: Evidence from mobile plan choices

Understanding the relation between consumer overspending, tariff choices and customer churn is extremely important in many industries. If consumers are insensitive to their overspending and keep making mistakes in tariff choices, firms may profit from overspending and do not have to worry about customer churn. In this paper, using a rich panel data from a major mobile network operator in China, we show evidence that consumers respond to financial incentives and try to reduce overspending by switching to another plan or terminating the relationships with the operator. Given the trade-off between profiting from overspending and reducing customer churn faced by the operator, we conduct a simple policy simulation and show that the operator should encourage consumers to reduce their overspending. We also show that the effects of switching decisions on future overspending and the hazard of churn differ among upward switchers (i.e. consumers who switch to a larger plan) and downward switchers (i.e., consumers who switch to a smaller plan). Specifically, we find that consumers who switch down are more likely to reduce their future overspending, while consumers who switch up are less likely to churn.