
The Impact of Facebook on Social Comparison and Happiness: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
The ubiquity of Facebook in modern life compels us to study its effects on well-being. We study a unique sample of users and non-users in a security-related organization, where Facebook usage was manipulated by an organizational policy change, initially banning Facebook altogether and later differentially restricting its usage. Thus, the assignment to the group of non-users was circumstantial rather than due to a-priori personal characteristics, which makes it possible to ide