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...

Through social media, politicians can personalize their campaigns and target specific groups of voters with an unprecedented precision. We assess the effects of such political micro-targeting by exploiting daily advertising prices on Facebook during the 2016 US presidential campaign. We measure...

We study the Gilets jaunes movement, which blocked most of France off in November 2018. We first analyze the complementarity/substitutability between the different forms of mobilization and find that blockades were planned online and later reinforced online activism. Second, we do textual...

We quantify the prevalence of undisclosed influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts. We develop a novel method to detect undisclosed influencer posts and find that 96% of influencer posts are not disclosed as such. Despite...

Social media has made anonymized behavior online a prevalent part of many people's daily interactions. The implications of this new ability to hide one's identity information remain imperfectly understood. Might it be corrosive to human cooperation? This paper investigates the possibility that a...

The importance of user-generated content is growing as media consumption is moving online; yet, investigations of media bias on user-generated content platforms are rare. We develop a novel procedure to detect coverage bias – i.e., bias in the amount of coverage certain topics or issues receive...

We present a new measure for the political position of news outlets based on politicians' selective sharing of news items. Politicians predominantly share news items that are in line with their political position, hence, one can infer the political position of news outlets from the politicians'...

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data -...

We analyze whether the social media popularity of Twitter star scientists, who were identified by Science in a 2014 report, pays off in terms of an increased number of citations. To establish a causal relationship, we use the COVID-19 global pandemic as a quasi-natural experiment exogenously...

I study demand for social media services by conducting an experiment where I monitor how participants spend time on digital services and shut off access to Instagram or YouTube on their mobile phones. I characterize how participants substitute their time during and after the restrictions, which...