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 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.
•Milestones in the number of unemployed increase the amount of unemployment news.•Disasters and terrorist attacks crowd out unemployment reports.•I use an IV approach to estimate the effect on people's perceptions of the economy.•A 1 SD increase in news accounts for a quarter of the monthly change in perceptions.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
•We analyze the introduction of a tax on income from short-term rentals in Norway.•We use a difference-in-differences approach with Sweden as a counterfactual.•Our results do not indicate any supply or price effects on Airbnb.•The findings highlight the importance of tax enforcement.
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.
•We analyze a data-sharing agreement between the Danish government and Airbnb.•The agreement reduced hosts' listing propensity and increased listing prices.•Hosts with multiple properties increased the availability of their objects.•Rental activities shifted from areas with high to low Airbnb penetration.•The results are in line with the notion that tax compliance increased.
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.
► This study investigates how news media affect unemployment expectations. ► Cumulative effects of repeated news coverage cultivate attitudes permanently. ► Negativity in reporting promotes pessimism ...in the long-run.
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.
