Working Papers
Media coverage and pandemic behaviour: Evidence from Sweden
With Maiting Zhuang. November 2021.
The Effects of Algorithmic Content Selection on User Engagement with News on Twitter
With Erwan Dujeancourt. March 2022.
Ownership and Media Slant: Evidence from Swedish Newspapers
With Jonna Rickardsson. January 2022.
Algorithmic Selection and Quality of Political News on Facebook
With Ferenc Szucs. January 2022.
Vita
I am an associate professor of economics at Jönköping University. Most of my work focuses on the economics of news markets, especially from an empirical perspective. I am particularly interested in issues with political implications, such as media slant and opinion diversity, as well as the role of social platforms for news supply and news consumption. My research often involves text-as-data techniques and methods supporting causal inference from observational data.
Contact
Jönköping International Business School, Office B5015, Gjuterigatan 5, 55318 Jönköping, Sweden
+46 36 10 1782
Publications
Clickbait News and Algorithmic Curation
With Juliane Lischka, 2021. Forthcoming in New Media & Society (working paper version; replication data and code).
Media Influence on Vote Choices: Unemployment News and Incumbents' Electoral Prospects
With Greg Martin. American Journal of Political Science, 65: 278-293, 2021 (working paper version; replication data and code).
Cartels in the European Union, Antitrust Action, and Public Attention
With Sabrina Maaß. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 186: 533-547, 2021 (online appendix; working paper version; replication data and code).
Political Scandals, Newspapers, and the Election Cycle
With Jil Sörensen. Political Behavior, 43: 1017-1036, 2021 (working paper version; replication data and code).
Partisan Selective Engagement: Evidence from Facebook
With Jil Sörensen and Daniel Stone. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 177: 91-108, 2020 (online appendix; working paper version; replication data and code>).
The Supply of Media Slant Across Outlets and Demand for Slant Within Outlets: Evidence from US Presidential Campaign News
With Gaurav Sood, Daniel Stone, and Justin Wallace. European Journal of Political Economy, 63: 1-22, 2020 (working paper version; replication data and code).
Cautionary Tales: Celebrities, the News Media, and Participation in Tax Amnesties
With Verena Pagels. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 155: 288-300, 2018 (working paper version; replication data and code).
Effects of Unemployment News on Economic Perceptions – Evidence from German Federal States
Regional Science and Urban Economics, 68: 172-190, 2018 (working paper version; replication data and code).
Retirement, Consumption of Political Information, and Political Knowledge
European Journal of Political Economy, 53: 109-119, 2018 (working paper version; code for replication).
Politicians under Investigation: The News Media’s Effect on the Likelihood of Resignation
With Jil Sörensen. Journal of Public Economics, 153: 82-91, 2017 (working paper version; replication data and code).
The Online Market for Illegal Copies of Magazines: A German Case Study
With A. Rott and M. Wass von Czege. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59: 169–183, 2015.
Bad News Sells: The Demand for News Magazines and the Tone of Their Covers
With M. Arango-Kure and A. Rott. Journal of Media Economics, 27: 199–214, 2014.
Good News and Bad News: Evidence of Media Bias in Unemployment Reports
Public Choice, 161: 499–515, 2014.
Labour Market Segmentation: Standard and Non-Standard Employment in Germany
German Economic Review, 14: 349–371, 2013.
Unemployment Expectations, Excessive Pessimism, and News Coverage
Journal of Economic Psychology, 34: 156–168, 2013.
Employment and Wages in Germany Since the 2004 Deregulation of the Temporary Agency Industry
International Labour Review, 152: 307–326, 2013.
Job Insecurity Perceptions and Media Coverage of Labor Market Policy
Journal of Labor Research, 33: 528–544, 2012.
Current
5th Economics of Media Bias Workshop
We’re happy to announce that the next media bias workshop will take place on March 31 and April 1, 2022, at Berlin Social Science Center. Alois Stutzer will deliver the keynote speech. The program can be downloaded here.
Connecting computer science, linguistics, psychology, and economics
I joined a group of researchers that investigates media bias from a highly interdisciplinary perspective. The media bias group develops systems and large-scale datasets to automatically detect biased or unbalanced coverage, using methods from disciplines such as computer science, linguistics, psychology, and economics. The groups also devises new ways to visualize data, in an effort to better understand what types of bias appear in which context.
Media influence on vote choices
In a recent study, Greg Martin and I investigate how news about the economy influences 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” causes a discontinuous increase in the amount of media coverage devoted to unemployment conditions, and 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 US Governor vote shares are large and notably asymmetric: bad milestone events hurt roughly twice as much as good milestone events help.
Funding for project on Swedish newspaper markets
The Swedish Competition Authority has approved funding in the amount of approx. 180,000 euro for a project of mine entitled “Media Competition and Media Slant in Swedish Newspapers” (with Jonna Rickardsson). The project investigates how competition in local media markets affects the diversity of opinions in newspaper coverage. Specially, we (1) construct an index of ideological slant, (2) investigate which motives of media owners drive the slant, and (3) estimate the causal effect of competition on slant. The results aim to inform the debate on media regulation, with a focus on press subsidies and the measurement of media concentration.
4th Economics of Media Bias Workshop
After a successful start of the series in June 2015, the fourth Economics of Media Bias Workshop will take place on February 21-22, 2019, in Berlin, Germany. Eliana La Ferrara (Bocconi University) will deliver the keynote speech. The workshop, which is organized by my colleagues and me, addresses the forms, causes, and consequences of media bias, especially in news markets. The program can be downloaded here.