Working Papers

Gender Bias, Feedback, and Productivity (New version coming soon!)

I study how gender-biased feedback affects worker productivity in an online labor market. I focus on content creators, an increasingly important segment of online labor, and show that female creators received significantly more negative feedback than male creators for comparable content, gap that was eliminated after YouTube removed public dislike counts. Using detailed video- and channel-level data and a difference-in-differences design that leverages the larger decline in dislikes experienced by female creators following the platform design change, I find that the reduction in negative feedback significantly and persistently increased both their productivity and consumer demand for their content. After the change, women increased their video production by 8.4% more than men and experienced a 15.5% greater increase in demand for their content. Exploring mechanisms, I show that the decline in negative feedback is concentrated among videos with very high dislike counts, consistent with YouTube’s stated goal of reducing harassment through ''dislike attacks''. A placebo test confirms that the productivity effects are driven by the reduction in dislikes rather than by their removal from public view, and I find limited spillover effects on toxicity in another feedback channel—comments. 

Media coverage: Fast Company
Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlBpdp_7UX8 

Substituting Away? The Effect of Platform Bargaining Regulation on Content Display

In response to growing platform market power, governments seek ways to strengthen the bargaining position of content providers and other suppliers of platforms. Due to information asymmetries between platforms and regulators, top-down interventions—such as mandated transaction prices— are difficult to implement. This paper examines the effects of a bottom-up, bargaining-based regulatory alternative: Australia’s News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. The Code mandates that platforms negotiate payments for content with domestic publishers, backed by final-offer arbitration. Using a difference-in-differences design and granular data from Google News, I show that the Code significantly altered the composition of news content. In particular, the share of content from large foreign publishers increased, while that of major domestic publishers declined—consistent with changes in the relative cost of displaying different types of content.

Media coverage: The Conversation
Short presentation: https://youtu.be/S8c0o5a5HPA?t=221 

Work in Progress

Media Competition and News Quality: Evidence from Bargaining Regulation with Enrico Camarda, Mattia Nardotto, and Tommaso Valletti

News Access, News Consumption and Voting Behavior: Evidence from Facebook's News Ban in Australia with Mattia Nardotto