Thought Leadership

With in-feed advertising becoming an increasingly popular advertising tool for advertisers to reach mobile consumers, the authors propose an integrated model of contemporaneous, carryover, and spillover effects to measure the incremental contributions of in-feed ads in multiple types of mobile apps: newsfeed, social, and video. They empirically examine the three proposed effects of newsfeed ads, social feed ads, and video feed ads using data from a large-scale ad campaign for a new mobile game. The data set contains 10,115,801 impressions, 286,506 clicks, and 12,706 conversions. First, the findings show that social feed ads have the strongest contemporaneous effects on both ad clicks and conversions; social feed ads are 1.87 times more likely to generate a click and 1.69 times more likely to generate a conversion than newsfeed ads, followed by video feed ads (clicks: 1.73 times; conversions: 1.55 times). Second, video feed ads have the strongest carryover effect, followed by social feed ads, while newsfeed ads have a negative carryover effect. Third, newsfeed ads exhibit the strongest spillover effect; prior newsfeed ad exposures are more effective than prior social or video feed ad exposures at promoting clicks and conversions upon subsequent exposure in other channels.

Using a new database on global multinational production (MP), I document that world multinational enterprise (MNE) sales declined as sharply as trade during the Great Recession (2008–2009). This collapse was driven by MNEs from a few key headquarters countries and associated with steeper GDP declines in MP-intensive countries. MNEs amplified the trade collapse because their overall sales fell while they maintained higher trade intensity than domestic firms. In a calibrated quantitative model with flexible vertical and horizontal MNE structures, international trade, and input–output linkages, I show that productivity shocks, which disproportionately affected trade-intensive MNEs, contributed more to the trade collapse than demand shocks. MNEs’ productivity shocks accounted for over half of the global GDP decline during the Great Recession. MP linkages significantly amplified the transmission of headquarters-country productivity shocks to global GDP, MP, and trade.

The mandatory switch from the incurred loss model to the more forward-looking current expected credit loss (CECL) model was originally scheduled to begin in 2020. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic started in early 2020, US regulators made the switch voluntary. Our study investigates how banks' exposure to the pandemic affects their decision to adopt CECL as well as adopting banks' pandemic-era pattern of loan loss provisions. First, consistent with pandemic-driven economic uncertainty reducing banks' willingness to adopt the new model, we find a negative association between banks' pandemic exposure and their CECL adoption. This association is more pronounced for banks with more lending opportunities, more lending competition, and worse loan quality. Second, compared with non-adopters, CECL adopters report more loan loss provisions during the pandemic's early period, and less or even negative loan loss provisions during the late period. The latter scenario reflects a reversal of earlier loan loss reserves and is more pronounced for banks with more exposure to states with a higher level of vaccination, consistent with banks having a more positive economic outlook because of improving pandemic conditions. Overall, our study offers useful insights into the adoption and implementation of accounting standards during periods of economic uncertainty.