JBNST - Vol. 237/2 - 2017

Social media applications such as wikis, blogs or social networks are being increasingly applied in firms. These applications can be used for external communication and internal knowledge management. Firms can potentially increase their productivity by optimising customer relationship management, marketing, market research and project management. On the other hand, the use of social media might lead to shirking among employees and might be, in general, very time-consuming preventing employees from managing their normal workload. This might lead to a decrease of labour productivity. This paper analyses the relationship between social media applications and labour productivity using firm-level data of 907 German manufacturing and service firms. The analysis is based on a Cobb-Douglas production function. The results reveal that social media might be related to labour productivity in an negative way which points towards a suboptimal use of social media.

Empirically analyzing household behavior usually relies on informal data preprocessing. That is, before an econometric model is estimated, observations are selected in such a way that the resulting subset of data is sufficiently homogeneous to be of interest for the specific research question pursued. In the context of estimating equivalence scales for household income, we use matching techniques and balance checking at this initial stage. This can be interpreted as a non-parametric approach to preprocessing data and as a way to formalize informal procedures. To illustrate this, we use German micro-data on household expenditure to estimate equivalence scales as a specific example. Our results show that matching leads to results which are more stable with respect to model specification and that this type of formal preprocessing is especially useful if one is mainly interested in results for specific subgroups, such as low-income households.