Essays in Development Economics
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Date
July 12, 2021
Author(s)
Sun, Zhengyun
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Citation
Sun, Zhengyun. 2021. Essays in Development Economics. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Abstract
This dissertation explores how firms, consumers and households in the developing world adopt digital technology and interact with each other in the digital economy. The first chapter studies how a large-scale business training intervention addresses the growth barriers that new e-commerce sellers face. With experimental evidence, this chapter finds that the training leads to an increase in sellers' revenues and consumers' welfare by improving matching efficiency on the platform. The second chapter investigates online sellers' decisions to acquire information and the impact of data access on their business strategy and revenue growth. This chapter explores the heterogeneous determinants and responses as sellers of varying sizes acquire information, shedding light on the design of the platform's information policy. The third chapter examines households' labor supply decisions during the online schooling episode during the COVID pandemic. This chapter uses survey data and leverages the reopening schedule to show that online education lowers parents' labor supply due to increasing childcare demand.
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