Online dating apps have revolutionized the dating market over the past decade, yet their broader effects remain unclear. We analyze the impact of the early diffusion of the leading dating app -- Tinder -- across U.S. colleges on dating behavior, relationships, and health. For identification, we rely on the ample evidence that Tinder's early promotion strategy focused primarily on Greek organizations on college campuses. Using a comprehensive survey of college students containing more than 1.1 million responses around the year of Tinder's rollout, we estimate a difference-in-differences model comparing student outcomes before and after Tinder's rollout and across individuals with varying Greek organization membership. We find that the introduction of Tinder led to a sharp and persistent increase in reported dating and sexual activity. It had no impact on the probability of being in a relationship or having relationship problems and, on average, caused a relative improvement in student mental health. However, it also increased the frequency of reported instances of sexual assault and sexually transmitted diseases. Accordingly, these effects have downstream impacts on self-reported academic performances. A complementary identification strategy relying on across-college comparisons confirms that the above estimates are not driven by spillovers on non-Greek students. Overall, these findings suggest that, by dramatically reducing search costs, online dating apps altered dating-market equilibria toward higher turnover in romantic couplings and greater prevalence of casual sex.
Work in ProgressHow does local government amalgamation affect public goods provision, economic activity, and nation building? We focus on an administrative reform in Ukraine between 2015-2020, during which smaller local councils (LCs) had the opportunity to voluntarily amalgamate in order to keep a substantially larger portion of their tax revenues and gain greater autonomy over the local administration. By investigating the determinants of the willingness to amalgamate, we show that some of the pre-reform characteristics, such as tax revenues, the share of native Russian speakers, and political preferences, were not substantial predictors of the amalgamation. We first show that the reform positively impacted district level personal income tax collection. Secondly, by employing previously unused data on standardized college entrance exam results, we estimate a staggered difference-in-differences model and show that the reform did not affect the Ukrainian test scores significantly. For math results, it led to a 0.07 standard deviation decrease after four years of exposure. Utilizing the same staggered design, we show that the reform led to 0.06 standard deviations increase in log nightlight intensity per capita after four years of exposure. Finally, using a nationally representative repeated cross-sectional survey, we document the greater self-identification as Ukrainian as opposed to Russian in rural areas.
bbuyukeren@redphd.it
PhD Candidate in Economics
Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) and LUISS (Rome Economics Doctorate)