NES Rector Ruben Enikolopov and Alfa Banking Group named professor, NES professor Maria Petrova together with their co-author Konstantin Sonin, NES graduate (MAE'1998) and professor of NES in 2001-2013, currently John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, became the winners of the 2021 AEJ Best Paper Awards for their joint research “Social Media and Corruption”.
The annual American Economic Journal (AEJ) Best Paper Awards highlight the best paper in each of the American Economic Journals: Applied Economics, Economic Policy, Macroeconomics, and Microeconomics published over the last three years. Nominations are provided by the American Economic Association members, and winners are selected by the journals' Boards of Editors.
In the paper “Social Media and Corruption”, the authors consider whether social media could hold institutional corruption in check when mainstream media is unable — or unwilling — to do so. Enikolopov, Petrova and Sonin show that blog posts, which exposed corruption in Russian state-controlled companies, had a negative causal impact on those companies’ market returns. For identification, the authors exploit the precise timing of blog posts by looking at within-day results with company-day fixed effects. Furthermore, they show that the posts are ultimately associated with higher management turnover and less minority shareholder conflicts, which is indicative of the positive effect of these posts on corporate governance in the affected companies. Taken together, the research results suggest that social media can discipline corruption even in a country with limited political competition and heavily censored traditional media.
The paper was written in 2012 and covers the events that took place before 2011. It was published in January 2018 in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.