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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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....