Plausibly Exogenous [990*] - Mobile Outage (10/16/2022)
Source of Exogenous Variation
No paper today but flagging a potential source of variation: power outage at Korea’s biggest mobile messenger app used by 90% (!) of the population yesterday
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/fire-knocks-out-services-south-korea-tech-giants-kakao-naver-2022-10-15/
Variables affected by this variation
Here’s some of my suggestions on interpreting this variation:
(1) demand shock for merchants who sell merchandise on the platform, which span not only small-scale manufacturers but also taxi drivers, delivery people;
(2) wealth shock for those who rented bikes and couldn’t end their travels, thus being charged +10x the original price;
(3) liquidity shock for people who wanted to dine using gift cards stored on the app but couldn’t and thus had to use cash (gift card usage on this app are very common);
(4) information shock for people who couldn’t access the email services (in Korea gmail is still not the dominant form of email);
(5) productivity shock for people who primarily use this service to communicate among workers (the usage is very prevalent across multiple industries, including the military)
Some of the more interesting (and funny) ones include:
(1) people who were caught cheating because the multiple profile feature (where you can switch between different profiles to talk to different people) became suddenly revealed to everyone;
(2) people who couldn’t receive birthday messages (and thus have to wait one more year) because people usually use this app to check birthdays;
(3) people who wanted to sell their crypto assets but couldn’t because they logged into the exchanges via this service