When Celebrities Speak: A Nationwide Twitter Experiment Promoting Vaccination in Indonesia

Celebrity endorsements are often sought to influence public opinion. We ask whether celebrity endorsement per se has an effect beyond the fact that their statements are seen by many, and whether on net their statements actually lead people to change their beliefs. To do so, we conducted a nationwide Twitter experiment in Indonesia with 46 high-profile celebrities and organizations, with a total of 7.8 million followers, who agreed to let us randomly tweet or retweet content promoting immunization from their accounts. Our design exploits the structure of what information is passed on along a retweet chain on Twitter to parse reach versus endorsement effects. Endorsements matter: tweets that users can identify as being originated by a celebrity are far more likely to be liked or retweeted by users than similar tweets seen by the same users but without the celebrities' imprimatur. By contrast, explicitly citing sources in the tweets actually reduces diffusion. By randomizing which celebrities tweeted when, we find suggestive evidence that overall exposure to the campaign may influence beliefs about vaccination and knowledge of immunization-seeking behavior by one's network. Taken together, the findings suggest an important role for celebrity endorsement.Comment: 55 pages, 13 tables, 6 figure

Associations of Child Poverty: Patterns and Differences

This paper examines the different dimensions of child poverty in Indonesia, looking at child outcomes and opportunities across consumption, health, education, housing, food security, social assistance and infrastructure. In addition to looking at each of these measures, we go further to investigate the associations between them, asking whether it is the same children who are poor on each dimension or different ones. For example, we look at the associations between physical access to education, health and transportation services; and consumption, housing, water and sanitation; whether money poor and food poor children are the same; the linkages between access to health services and social assistance and health outcomes; and associations between barriers to enrolment. These associations have important implications for program design and targeting. We present results over time, as well as for different populations of interest, such as rural, urban and female-headed households

Replication package for: "Do celebrity endorsements matter? A twitter experiment promoting vaccination in Indonesia"

<p>Alatas V, Chandrasekhar AG, Mobius M, Olken BA, and Paladines C. (2023) 'Do celebrity endorsements matter? A twitter experiment promoting vaccination in Indonesia'. <i>The Economic Journal</i></p&gt