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...

We study the effect of media coverage on individual behaviour 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 mandatory lockdowns or curfews. We show...

Low-pay work has been increasing in prevalence in many industrial countries. Following standard wage/price-setting theory, this increase should reduce structural unemployment, because labour market flexibility increases and labour costs decrease. However, a Keynesian perspective challenges this...

The creation of jobs in the low-pay sector is considered to be an approach to reduce unemployment, especially with respect to low-skilled workers. By now, the expansion of the German low-wage sector over the last 15 years is empirically confirmed, which indicates a successful implementation of...

This study uses an original state-level data set to investigate whether press coverage on trials for tax evasion by celebrities affects the likelihood that other tax payers participate in Germany’s tax amnesty program. To identify the causal effect, we use exogenous variation in the reporting,...

This paper studies the effect of news media on the probability of resignation 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...

How to understand the mistakes we make about those on the other side of the political spectrum—and how they drive the affective polarization that is tearing us apart.It's well known that the political divide in the United States—particularly between Democrats and Republicans—has grown to...

The recent nonexperimental literature on social learning focuses on showing that observational learning exists, that is, individuals do indeed draw inferences by observing the actions of others. We take this literature a step further by analyzing whether individuals are Bayesian social learners....