I am a Visiting Professor of Economics at the Department of Applied Economics at Universitat de les Illes Balears.
I earned my Ph.D. in Economics from CEMFI.
My research focuses on applied microeconomics, specifically in digital economics, industrial organization, and urban economics. My current research explores the role of cultural norms in shaping consumer behavior in the digital economy.
Access my CV here or contact me at cayrua.chaves@uib.es for further information.
Gerard Llobet (PhD Advisor) | Diego Puga |
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Pedro Mira | Guillermo Caruana |
Evidence from surveys and lab experiments suggests that people’s propensity to conform to the opinion of others is lower in more individualistic cultures. Do these findings hold in real-world settings? This paper quantifies the role of culture as a determinant of social influence in the context of online consumer reviews. Exploring discontinuities in the way Tripadvisor displays average ratings, I estimate how reviewers from different countries respond to the average opinion of past consumers. A discontinuous increase of 0.5 stars in a restaurant’s average rating leads reviewers from countries with the least individualistic cultures to report ratings that are 0.1 stars higher. The size of the effect reduces in individualism and becomes statistically insignificant for consumers from the most individualistic cultures. The negative relationship between individualism and reviewers’ tendency to conform cannot be explained by country-level predictors of individualism, such as income or religion. Moreover, cross-regional variation within Italy reveals that the correlation between cultural values and social influence also holds across reviewers from different regions within the same country. These findings imply that average ratings converge faster to firms’ real quality when reviewers are from more individualistic cultures.
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in short-term rentals (STRs) facilitated by digital platforms such as Airbnb. This study evaluates the impacts of regulations imposed on these platforms, focusing on the Home-Sharing Ordinance implemented in Santa Monica, California. Using a Synthetic Control Method, the analysis finds that, two years after its implementation, the ordinance caused the number of Airbnb entire home listings to decrease by 60%. However, the study found no evidence that this regulation influenced long-term rental prices. Finally, suggestive evidence indicates that the ordinance did not increase the supply of houses allocated for long-term renters, potentially explaining its lack of impact on rents.
This paper empirically studies the impacts of short-term rental and home-sharing activities on neighborhood-level outcomes. It focuses on the city of Madrid and builds a comprehensive dataset of Airbnb activity and core neighborhood attributes (house prices, consumption amenities, and jobs) to argue that the increasing presence of touristic apartments affects each one of these core neighborhood attributes. I find that Airbnb activity increases house prices, consumption amenities that are highly demanded by tourists (restaurants), and low-wage jobs. In addition, I use data on cross-neighborhood mobility patterns to show that, directly and indirectly by its effect on house prices, Airbnb activity reduces population density by preventing some of the in-migration of would-be new neighborhood residents.
This article studies the impacts of online reviews on firm dynamics and consumer welfare in the context of the restaurant industry. Preliminary evidence suggests that restaurants that get reviews early are likely to survive, while entrants with few reviews exit early. To explore a potential explanation, I build a model featuring firms of heterogeneous quality facing static pricing decisions and dynamic entry and exit choices. Imperfectly informed consumers are modeled under the rational inattention framework. They use aggregate information provided by online reviews to form priors regarding quality but can also process additional information at a cost. If the cost to process information is high enough, young firms have to operate at very low profits even if they have high quality. The model highlights that the overall impact of online review websites depends on their effect on consumers’ prior beliefs and on the cost of obtaining information from other sources.