Begin: Friday, 22. of June 2018 (10:30 AM)
Location: Warburger Straße 100, room Q5.245
On June 22, 2018, Prof. Dr. Mohammad Saifur Rahman will give a talk about "Shared Prosperity (or Lack Thereof) in the Sharing Economy" in the context of the SFB 901.
Professor Mohammad Saifur Rahman is an Associate Professor of Management at the Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. He was named one of the World's Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40 by Poets and Quants in 2017. His current research focuses on digital transformation and local market structure, digital traces, as well as crowdsourcing and the sharing economy. He has published in major journals including Management Science, Information Systems Research, and MIT Sloan Management Review. He currently also serves as an Associate Editor at Management Science and Information Systems Research.
Abstract of the talk:
This paper examines the heterogeneous economic spillover effects of a home sharing platform---Airbnb---on the growth of a complimentary local service---restaurants. By circumventing traditional land-use regulation and providing access to underutilized inventory, Airbnb is attracting the visitors of a city to vicinities that are not traditional tourist destinations. Although visitors generally bring significant spending power, it is, however, not clear if the visitors use Airbnb primarily for lodging, thus, not contributing to the local economy. To evaluate this, we focus on the impact of Airbnb on the employment growth of New York City (NYC) restaurants. Our results indicate that if the intensity of Airbnb activity (Airbnb reviews per household) increases by 2%, the restaurant employment in that neighborhood grows by approximately 3%. We use algorithmic matching in combination with a difference-in-difference (DID) specification that utilizes the spatial and temporal differences in Airbnb entry into NYC neighborhoods. We validate the underlying mechanism behind this result by evaluating the impact of Airbnb on Yelp visitor reviews. In particular, neighborhoods with increasing Airbnb activity also experience a surge in their share of NYC visitor reviews. This result is further validated by evaluating the impact of a unique Airbnb neighborhood level policy recently implemented in New Orleans. We also investigate the role of demographics and market concentration in driving the variation. Notably, restaurants in areas with a relatively high number of Black residents do not benefit from the economic spillover of Airbnb activity.
