Economic downturn and volunteering: Do economic crises affect content generation on Wikipedia?

Michael Kummer, Olga Slivko and Michael Zhang

No 15-078, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: In this paper, we address the impact of surging unemployment on online public good provision. Specifically, we ask how drastically increased unemployment affects voluntary contributions of content to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We put together a monthly country-level data set, which combines country specific economic outcomes with data on contributions to the online encyclopedia. As a source of exogenous variation in the economic state we use the fact that European countries were affected by the financial crisis in the US in September 2008 with different intensity. For European countries, we find that the economic downturn is associated with more viewership, which channels higher participation of volunteers in Wikipedia expressed in editing activity and content growth. We provide evidence for increased information search online or online learning as a potential channel of the change in public goods provision, which is a potentially important side effect of economic downturn.

Keywords: public goods; unemployment; online platforms; user generated content (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D29 D80 H41 J60 L17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Economic downturn and volunteering: Do economic crises affect content generation on Wikipedia? (2017)
Working Paper: Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia? (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:15078

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