Publications (peer-reviewed)

Debunking “fake news” on social media: Immediate and short-term effects of fact-checking and media literacy interventions
with Anna Kerkhof, Felix Mindl and Johannes Münster
[Open Access Publication] [Working Paper Version] [Policy Briefing]
Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 245, May 2025

We conduct a randomized survey experiment to compare the immediate and short-term effects of fact-checking to a brief media literacy intervention. We show that fact-checking primarily affects the specific fake news it directly addresses, whereas media literacy helps to distinguish between false and correct information more generally, both immediately and around two weeks after the intervention. A plausible mechanism is that media literacy enables participants to critically evaluate social media postings, while fact-checking fails to enhance their skills as much. Our results promote media literacy as an effective tool to fight fake news, that is cheap, scalable, and easy-to-implement.

Working Papers

How digital media markets amplify news sentiment
[Working Paper] (JMP 2025/2026)

This paper investigates how digital market incentives shape the emotional tone of news headlines and its consequences for information transmission. Using more than 330,000 articles from major German newspapers, online headlines are shown to be markedly more emotional and more negative than their print counterparts. Experiments with professional journalists demonstrate that stronger economic incentives to attract attention (through pay-per-click or subscription-based remuneration) causally induce more emotional and negative headline choices. Complementary reader experiments reveal that these attention-driven environments increase engagement, but impair the retrieval of factual information. Together, the findings document a market-based mechanism of media bias through which commercial incentives amplify emotional framing in news headlines and, in turn, diminish the accuracy of audience learning.

Improving science literacy in the newsroom: Experimental evidence
with Anna Kerkhof and Nikola Noske
[Working Paper] (submitted)

Accurate reporting of new findings is essential for an informed public, yet limited science literacy among journalists often results in misinterpretation of research, with costly societal and economic consequences. We develop a concise educational video that aims to enhance journalists’ science literacy through explaining important checkpoints for sound research reporting (funding, sample, statistics, causal claims, visuals). The impact of this video is tested in a preregistered experiment with 260 German journalists. Treated participants produce correct headlines for 64 percent of study-based news stories versus 36 percent in the control group – a 29-percentage-point rise ($p<0.001$). They also become more likely to flag statistical and causal errors in existing articles. An exploratory follow-up using 268 real-world articles suggests a reduction in factual mistakes by treated journalists. Our findings highlight that a brief, low-cost intervention can measurably improve the scientific accuracy of journalism, offering a scalable strategy for news organizations and training programs.

The effect of narratives on economic behavior
with Sören Harrs and Bettina Rockenbach
[Working Paper] (submitted)

Narratives are omnipresent in today’s media to complement or even substitute “hard facts”. Opinion leaders use narratives to persuade the audience of their interpretation of events, especially, when major exogenous shocks hit the economy. Despite the importance of narratives in public discourse, surprisingly little is known about their economic impact. In this paper, we provide experimental evidence that communication through narratives can have severe – potentially unintended – effects on fundamental determinants of financial behavior. In a controlled experiment subjects are exposed to news articles that either provide an optimistic, a pessimistic, or a balanced narrative about the COVID pandemic. We find that the more pessimistic a narrative is about the pandemic, the more pessimistic are subjects’ expectations about the development of the stock market. Remarkably, we also find significant collateral effects of narratives on subjects’ risk aversion and patience in incentivized experimental decisions. In a follow-up experiment, we investigate the mechanisms for the latter behavioral effects. Our results improve our understanding of how communication about exogenous shocks influences economic behavior by showing that narratives impact financial behavior through expectations, but – in case of strong personal involvement – may also have collateral behavioral effects on financial decision-making.

Policy Papers (no peer-review)

Digitale Medienmärkte: Was tun gegen Hassrede und Falschinformationen? (with Raphaela Andres) Wirtschaftsdienst 105(3) , 161-166, 2025.

Fake News in den sozialen Medien – was hilft? (with Anna Kerkhof, Felix Mindl and Johannes Münster) ECONtribute Policy Brief No. 039, 10/2022..

Selected Work in Progress

Upholding a good image: Selective country comparisons in the media (with Gönül Dogan and Louis Strang)
data collection completed

Information acquisition via ChatGPT and TikTok: The effects on beliefs, attitudes and narratives (with Yero Ndiaye)
pilot stage

Motivation

In my research I use various empirical methods and large datasets to tackle questions in the fields of political economy and applied microeconomics. My primary focus is the digitization of the news industry. This area is extremely interesting, because digitalized media markets are crucial for the future of democratic societies in many political and economic dimensions – they have the potential to shape worldviews of billions. With my work I want to improve our understanding of these markets and their relationships to the macroeconomy.