News media are often believed to focus on negative events as a means to increase their audience and profits. This study evaluates whether this conjecture applies in the case of the 3 German news magazines Der Spiegel, Stern, and Focus in the period from 1997 to 2009. Based on detailed content analyses of issues with political and economic cover stories, the results indicate significant, positive correlations between explicitly negative cover pages and the magazines' sales, after controlling for a comprehensive set of other success drivers and influences.

Entrepreneurs can benefit from the communities they build. Therefore, many entrepreneurs create online communities that allow self-selected stakeholders, such as customers, crowd investors, or enthusiasts, to interact with the venture and other like-minded individuals. However, research on how entrepreneurs can successfully engage community members and grow such online communities is only slowly emerging. In particular, it is unclear if, how much, and which content entrepreneurs should contribute to foster engagement in different types of communities and which role these community types play in the community's overall growth. Based on a longitudinal case study in the video game industry, we first theorize and show that-depending on the community type-both too much and too little entrepreneur-provided content fails to leverage community engagement potential and that different communities require more or less diverging content. We then theorize and show that community growth is largely driven by engagement in open communities, such as those hosted on social media. We outline the implications this has for entrepreneurs, our understanding of online communities, and entrepreneurial communities more generally. How can entrepreneurs engage and grow different types of online communities?Managing online communities is crucial for many entrepreneurs. However, different community types, open and core, play different roles and require different content and growth strategies. Core communities, such as those hosted on online forums, respond well to less but more diverse content, whereas open communities on social media drive overall community growth with more but less diverse content. Entrepreneurs need to find the right balance and pay attention to the tipping point of content provision, as too much content might endanger community member engagement. By understanding the dynamics of online communities, entrepreneurs can effectively nurture engagement and optimize their efforts for long-term success. Investing resources wisely in content production, considering the costs involved, can be beneficial for new ventures seeking sustainable community growth.

In this article, we investigate how Twitter's switch from a reverse-chronological timeline to algorithmic content selection in March 2016 influenced user engagement with tweets published by German newspapers. To mitigate concerns about omitted variables, we use the Facebook postings of these newspapers as a counterfactual. We find that the number of likes increased by 20% and the number of retweets by 15% within a span of 30 days after the switch. Importantly, our results indicate a rich-get-richer effect, implying that initially more popular outlets and news topics benefited the most. User engagement also increased more for sensationalist content than quality news stories.

This study investigates whether news coverage about unemployment affects people's perceptions of the state of the economy. I compile a German state-level data set, based on household surveys and information obtained from analyzing 35 newspapers. The data are used to separate media effects from real economic consequences, taking advantage of two sources of exogenous variation. First, I exploit the salience of “milestones” in the number of unemployed. The news value of these milestones, which is not based on economic fundamentals, causes the media to report more about unemployment than usually. Second, I show that the amount of reports decreases when competing newsworthy events occur at the time of the release of the monthly unemployment statistics. Instrumental variable estimates indicate that a one standard deviation increase in coverage accounts for about a quarter of the average monthly change in the index of economic perceptions.

There has been a surge in temporary agency work in Germany since the 2004 deregulation of the temporary agency industry. Using empirical data, the author examines how this reform affected employment and wages. Controlling for compositional and macroeconomic effects, the results suggest that there was no change in overall employment, since temporary agency work replaced regular jobs. The wage gap between regular employees and temps widened after the reform, showing that firms use agency work to reduce labour costs. However, the main reason for the wage gap was the higher incidence of low-wage determinants among temps compared to regular employees.

This study employs information obtained from media content analyses, as well as economic and political data, to investigate negativity in unemployment news between 2001 and 2010 in Germany. The data indicate a substantial bias in terms of the amounts of negative and positive reports, compared with the actual development of unemployment. Moreover, the media tend to place negative unemployment reports more prominently than positive ones. The estimates suggest that the bias is not the consequence of journalists asymmetrically interpreting the official unemployment numbers. Instead, it is associated with the exploitation of often non-economic information and structural influences in the process of news production. 

This study employs a panel data set that combines information obtained from media content analysis, micro-level survey data, and macroeconomic variables to investigate the impact of media coverage on individual perceptions of job insecurity in Germany. Estimates indicate that these perceptions increase in years with greater quantity of news reporting. This volume effect is larger for socio-demographic groups with a generally low incidence of insecurity perceptions (e. g., highly educated and remunerated employees), which implies that unequally distributed perceptions converge when media coverage is strong. Moreover, the results suggest that information processing is subject to an optimism bias. 

Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel provide insight into the relationship between standard and non-standard work, from the perspective of dual labour market theory. We identify two segments that largely correspond to the common distinction between these forms of employment and find substantial differences in the determination of wages, as well as the composition of worker and job characteristics. These differences tend to increase after the Hartz reforms. The estimates also indicate the existence of a primary sector wage premium and job rationing, as well as specific patterns of labour mobility due to (partly non-economic) barriers between segments. 

This chapter reviews recent trends in empirical research on media and communication. In terms of data collection, researchers have been making increasing efforts to retrieve publicly available online data via application programming interfaces (APIs) and by using methods to crawl, scrape, and parse information. At the same time, there has been a trend to compile original datasets by digitizing material from historical sources. When it comes to measurement, the literature has benefited from automated methods that allow to analyze text as data, including text mining and natural language processing. Finally, a growing number of studies has been applying techniques that allow for causal inference with observational data. Methods such as instrumental variable regression, differences-in-differences, and regression discontinuity have become popular alternatives when controlled laboratory experiments are not feasible or desirable.

Democratic societies depend on citizens being informed about candidates and representatives, to allow for optimal voting and political accountability. As the Fourth Estate, news media have a crucial role in this context. However, due to selective exposure, media bias, and endogeneity it is not a priori clear if news consumption increases voter information. Focusing on the increase in leisure time that is associated with retirement, this study investigates whether changes in the consumption of political information affect campaign-related knowledge. For that purpose, I use survey data pertaining to the 2000, 2004, and 2008 US presidential elections. Instrumenting with eligibility for old age benefits, the results show that retirement improves respondents’ performance in answering knowledge questions. The effect is mostly driven by additional exposure to newscasts and newspapers. There is also evidence of increasing polarization due to retirement. 

This study employs monthly survey data and information obtained from media content analyses to investigate the potential link between (negativity in) economic news coverage and the pessimism in German unemployment expectations. For the period from 2001 to 2009, time-series estimates do not indicate a link in the short-run, but the cumulative effects of repeated media coverage affect long-run attitudes. A single negative report has a long-term effect similar to that of a positive one, but the quantitative dominance of negative over positive news causes an asymmetric reaction in unemployment expectations, which promotes pessimism. 

This study compiles an original dataset to investigate whether the timing of actions by the European Commission in cartel proceedings is affected by the overall news agenda. Our results indicate that certain actions are more likely to coincide with large predictable news events (e.g., the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics), the more EU firms involved in a cartel – compared to cartels with few EU companies or many non-EU firms. Studying the implications of the differential timing, we find that the occurrence of unrelated newsworthy events lowers public attention to the actions, as measured by news agency and newspaper reports, as well as relevant Google searches. These findings do not constitute conclusive evidence of favoritism, that the Commission favors domestic companies by reducing the negative publicity associated with the proceedings. However, even a suspicion of a subtle form of protectionism undermines the Commission's role as an independent supranational regulator.

How does news about the economy influence voting decisions? We isolate the effect of the information environment from the effect of change in the underlying economic conditions themselves by taking advantage of left-digit bias. We show that unemployment figures crossing a round-number “milestone” cause a discontinuous increase in the amount of media coverage devoted to unemployment conditions, and we use this discontinuity to estimate the effect of attention to unemployment news on voting, holding constant the actual economic conditions on the ground. Milestone effects on incumbent U.S. governor vote shares are large and notably asymmetric: Bad milestone events hurt roughly twice as much as good milestone events help.

The assumption that ownership has an effect on the diversity of news is based on the forms of control that ownership allows and the market conditions in which ownership is exercised. In this study, we perform a large-scale analysis of the Swedish newspaper market, surveying 130 newspapers and parliamentary speeches over a period of six years (2014-2019), to substantiate to what extent market and for-profit ownership forms impact political viewpoint diversity. Our analysis shows that newspapers with market leadership and chain ownership offer more political viewpoint diversity than number two and single-owned papers. In contrast, the ownership forms surveyed here (private, foundation, and publicly traded ownerships) display little effect on newspapers' internal diversity. We also find that a greater number of papers in a local market does not imply more external diversity in that market. The analysis thus offers some nuance to the notion that ownership form and market pluralism are prerequisites for viewpoint diversity, highlighting instead the importance of scale effects for pluralistic media systems.

This study investigates whether press coverage on celebrities with tax issues affects the behavior of other tax payers. We compile an original data set for Germany, including regional information on the amount of tax payers using amnesty regulations to voluntarily disclose taxes they have evaded. The data set also includes counts of news reports published by 6 national and 54 local newspapers that address celebrity tax evaders who were publicly tried between January 2010 and June 2016. We find a strong correlation between the amount of self-denunciations and the news coverage. To identify the causal effect, we use exogenous variation in the reporting, resulting from disasters and terrorist attacks that coincide with the celebrity trials. Instrumental variable estimates suggest that an increase in news coverage by the amount of an average trial raises participation in the tax amnesty program by approximately 22.5%. This finding helps to better understand the effectiveness of tax amnesties, and it illustrates the economic implications of publicly trying famous personalities.

This study investigates the role of media owners for the political bias of newspapers in Sweden, using an original dataset on outlets, consumer preferences, and ownership between January 2014 and April 2019. We construct an index of slant based on similarities in the language between newspapers and speeches given by members of parliament. Our results indicate that newspapers held by the same owner tend to offer the same mix of slant, rather than aligning their bias with consumer preferences in their area of circulation. Owners are even less inclined to differentiate the slant across outlets before elections, when the political returns to persuasion are high. We find no evidence that owners impose a one-size-fits-all slant because product differentiation is too costly. In addition, we find suggestive evidence of owner-independent bias induced by the writers of opinion articles. The Swedish context illustrates that supply-driven slant cannot be ruled out in market-based media systems if the ties between media and politics are strong.

A few years ago, publishing companies started to sell digital copies of their magazines. This study investigates a consequence of this change: the increasing online trade with illegal copies. We collected data on almost 10,000 issues of German magazines that are illegally offered online. The files are distributed in a three-sided market, in which a small number of platforms bring suppliers of illegal copies, consumers, and advertisers together. The market has been growing rapidly—between 2009 and 2012 by a factor of 10. In contrast to the legal magazine market, the illegal trade mostly concerns IT and consumer electronics magazines.

Airbnb and other home-sharing platforms have been facing increasing regulation over the past years, mainly in the form of restricting short-term rentals through day caps. In contrast, as one of the first countries in the world, Denmark applied a collaborative strategy: In 2018, the government negotiated an agreement with Airbnb about the transmission of income data from the platform to the tax agency. We analyze how this data-sharing agreement affected hosts' behavior on the platform, using a difference-in-differences approach with Sweden as a counterfactual. We find that the agreement reduced hosts’ propensity to list property on the platform by 14%, while increasing listing prices by 11%. Our results indicate that platform exits were mostly limited to single-property hosts. In contrast, hosts with many properties and those in areas with initially low Airbnb penetration made their rental objects more often available and managed to increase the number of bookings. Overall, the findings imply that the data-sharing agreement not only helped to increase tax compliance but also led to a commercialization and spatial re-organization of short-term renting in Denmark.

This research note investigates the impact of a rental-income tax on hosts using Airbnb in Norway. We find that the cost increase implied by the tax did not induce hosts to exit the platform, nor did it lead to an increase in rental prices. These findings support the conjecture that the tax was insufficiently enforced, as it relied on taxpayers to self-report their rental income.

Variation in political slant across media outlets, and demand for such slant, has been studied extensively. We conduct a novel within-outlet (and within-topic) analysis of the demand for "congenially" slanted news. We study so-called horse race news from six major online outlets for the 2012 and 2016 US presidential campaigns. We find very limited evidence of higher demand for more congenial stories, and somewhat stronger evidence of higher demand for more uncongenial stories. However, we also find that, as expected, news is slanted congenially across outlets, counter-acting (and perhaps causing) any within-outlet preference for uncongenial slant. We discuss how our results are consistent with the three major mechanisms driving demand for slant studied in the theoretical literature, and enhance understanding of when each mechanism is more likely to come into play.

We conduct within-outlet, within-topic analysis of the relationship between partisan congeniality of news and news demand. We study “horse race” news on the 2012 and 2016US presidential campaigns from six major online outlets, and data from incentivized surveys on news on the winners of presidential campaign debates. We find some evidenceof higher demand for more congenial stories (within-outlet-topic), and some evidence ofhigher demand for more uncongenial stories. We argue the former evidence is most consistent with psychological theories of demand for slant, and the latter is most consistentwith the trust theory. We also obtain evidence of systematically congenial outlet-levelhorse race slant, arguably consistent with both the psychology and trust theories, butinconsistent with the instrumental value theory. 

We conduct across-outlet and within-outlet (and within-topic) analyses of “congenially” slanted news. We study “horse race” news (news on candidates' chances in an upcoming election) from six major online outlets for the 2012 and 2016 US presidential campaigns. We find robust evidence that horse race headlines were slanted congenially with respect to the preferences of the outlets' typical readers. However, evidence of congenial slant in the timing and frequency of horse race stories is weaker. We also find limited evidence of greater within-outlet demand for headlines most congenial to outlets' typical readers, and somewhat stronger evidence of greater demand for relatively uncongenial headlines. We discuss how various aspects of our results are consistent with each of the major mechanisms driving slant studied in the theoretical literature, and may help explain when each mechanism is more likely to come into play. In particular, readers may be more likely to click on uncongenial headlines due to inferring that these stories are particularly informative when they stand in contrast to an outlet's typically congenial slant.

This study investigates the effects of variation in “congeniality” of news on Facebook user engagement (likes, shares, and comments). We compile an original data set of Facebook posts by 84 German news outlets on politicians that were investigated for criminal offenses from January 2012 to June 2017. We also construct an index of each outlet’s media slant by comparing the language of the outlet with that of the main political parties, which allows us to measure the congeniality of the posts. We find evidence that users engaged with congenial posts more than with uncongenial ones, especially in terms of likes. The within-outlet, within-topic design allows us to infer that the greater engagement with congenial news is likely driven by psychological and social factors, rather than a desire for accurate or otherwise instrumental information.

Facebook has been criticized for exposing its users to low-quality and harmful information, including fake news, hate speech, and politically one-sided content. In December 2013 and again in August 2014, the platform updated its news feed algorithm to increase user exposure to quality content of news publishers, while curbing the proliferation of non-informative posts. This paper uses a sample of German newspapers to investigate the conjecture that these modifications raised the incentives to publish quality news stories on the platform, focusing on the number and diversity of news story posts about substantive political issues. Using the newspapers’ print editions as a counterfactual, our results indicate an increase in the amount of substantive political news on Facebook by approximately 30%. This expansion occurred in a politically balanced way, except that the outlets disproportionately increased their Facebook coverage of the formerly underrepresented Linke (Left Party). Consequently, the within-outlet concentration of political viewpoints decreased by about one half of the standard deviation of our concentration indices.

Election outcomes are often influenced by political scandals. While a scandal usually has negative consequences for the ones being accused of a transgression, political opponents and even media outlets may benefit. Anecdotal evidence suggests that certain scandals could be orchestrated, especially if they are reported right before an election. This study examines the timing of news coverage of political scandals relative to the national election cycle in Germany. Using data from electronic newspaper archives, we document a positive and highly significant relationship between coverage of government scandals and the election cycle. On average, one additional month closer to an election increases the amount of scandal coverage by 1.3%, which is equivalent to a 62% difference in coverage between the first and the last month of a four-year cycle. We provide suggestive evidence that this pattern can be explained by political motives of the actors involved in the production of scandal, rather than business motives by the newspapers.

This paper studies the effect of news media on the probability of resigning from office of politicians being subject to criminal investigation. Using data on cases in which the political immunity of German representatives was lifted, we find that resignations are more common when the media covers the case intensely. The amount of this news coverage, in turn, depends on the availability of other newsworthy, exogenous events. Therefore, we instrument for coverage of liftings of immunity with the overall news pressure. We estimate the causal effect and find that a change from no coverage to the mean coverage increases the likelihood of resignation by 6.4 percentage points. The effect is likely driven by the crowding out of reports on politicians with the same ideology as the newspaper, rather than reports on representatives with different political leanings. There is no evidence that the reporting affects the chances of conviction. 

This study investigates the effects of variation in “congeniality” of news on Facebook user engagement (likes, shares, and comments). We compile an original data set of Facebook posts by 84 German news outlets on politicians that were investigated for criminal offenses from January 2012 to June 2017. We also construct an index of each outlet's media slant by comparing the language of the outlet with that of the main political parties, which allows us to measure the congeniality of the posts. We find that user engagement with congenial posts is higher than with uncongenial ones, especially in terms of likes. The within-outlet, within-topic design allows us to infer that the greater engagement with congenial news is likely driven by psychological and social factors, rather than a desire for accurate or otherwise instrumental information.

We study the effect of media coverage on individual behavior during a public health crisis. For this purpose, we collect a unique dataset of 200,000 newspaper articles about the Covid-19 pandemic from Sweden-one of the few countries that did not impose lockdowns or curfews. We show that mentions of Covid-19 significantly lowered the number of visits to workplaces and retail and recreation areas, while increasing the duration of stays in residential locations. Using two different identification strategies, we show that these effects are causal. The impacts are largest when Covid-19 news stories are more locally relevant, more visible and more factual. We find larger behavioral effects for articles that reference crisis managers (as opposed to medical experts) and contain explicit public health advice. These results have wider implications for the design of public communications and the value of the local media.

Algorithmic curation of social media platforms is considered to create a clickbait media environment. Although clickbait practices can be risky especially for legacy news outlets, clickbait is widely applied. We conceptualize clickbait content supply as a revision game with an unknown threshold. Combining supervised machine learning with time series analysis of Facebook posts and Twitter messages of 37 German legacy news outlets over 54 months, we observe outlets’ behavior following algorithm changes. Results reveal (1) an infrequent use of clickbait with few heavier-using outlets and (2) turning points of clickbait performance as clickbait supply and user interaction form a reversed U-shaped relationship. News outlets (3) collectively adjust toward an industry clickbait standard. While we (4) cannot prove that algorithmic curation increases clickbait, (5) Facebook’s regulative intervention to decrease clickbait disperses heterogeneous tendencies in clickbait supply. We contribute to an understanding of editorial decision-making in competitive environments facing platforms’ regulative intervention.

International courts lack traditional enforcement mechanisms. Scholars theorize that compliance with human rights rulings is therefore often driven by domestic processes, including political mobilization and parliamentary agenda setting. A necessary condition underlying these processes is attention to the rulings which is in part expected to be mediated by media attention. However, these conditions have not been explicitly addressed by the existing compliance literature. In this paper, we assess the impact of media attention to rulings by the European Court of the Human Rights on the likelihood of their implementation, using a novel dataset of case-specific news coverage. Exploiting exogenous variation in media attention caused by competing newsworthy events, we find that the probability of compliance increases, the more coverage a ruling receives. Our findings indicate that domestic news media play a key role for compliance with international courts.