Media coverage and pandemic behaviour: Evidence from Sweden

Maiting Zhuang () and Marcel Garz ()
Additional contact information
Maiting Zhuang: Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics, Postal: Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, SE-113 83 Stockholm, Sweden
Marcel Garz: Jonkoping University

No 61, SITE Working Paper Series from Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics

Abstract: 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 that mentions of Covid-19 significantly lowered the number of visits to workplaces and retail and recreation areas, while increasing the duration of stays in residential locations. Using two different identification strategies, we show that these effects are causal. The impacts are largest when Covid-19 news stories are more locally relevant, more visible and more factual. We find larger behavioural effects for articles that reference crisis managers (as opposed to medical experts) and contain explicit public health advice. These results have wider implications for the design of public communications and the value of the local media.

Keywords: Covid-19; Mobility; Newspapers; Persuasion; Public health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 H12 I12 I18 J22 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2022-08-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://swopec.hhs.se/hasite/papers/hasite0061.1.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hasite:0061

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SITE Working Paper Series from Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, SE-113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dominick Nilsson ().