•We study effects of public trials for tax evasion by celebrities on tax payers.•Press coverage on these trials predicts participation in the tax amnesty program.•We use disasters and terrorist ...attacks to identify the causal effect.•An additional trial raises the participation in the tax amnesty program by 22.5%.
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.
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.
Plain English Summary
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.
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.
•News algorithms affect the amount of substantive political news on Facebook.•The higher number of political news items on Facebook increases ideological concentration.•Reduction of ideological ...concentration operates through the “Law of Large Numbers” and a higher representation of niche ideologies.
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.
•We study the timing of actions by the European commission in cartel proceedings.•The timing differs between EU and non-EU firms.•Actions against EU firms are more likely to place when the public is ...distracted.•The findings raise the suspicion of a subtle form of protectionism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
•We study effects of news media on the probability of resignation of politicians.•Our data refer to German representatives whose political immunity was lifted.•We instrument for coverage of liftings of immunity with the overall news pressure.•A change from zero to the mean coverage raises the resignation probability by 6.4 percentage points.
•We construct an index of slant for 84 German news outlets.•We investigate if congeniality of news affects Facebook user engagement.•Users engage with congenial posts more than with uncongenial ...ones.•The effect is likely driven by psychological and social factors.
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.
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. Reprinted by permission of Wiley-Blackwell
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