Saved by the news? COVID-19 in German news and its relationship with regional mobility behavior

Burcu Ozgun and Tom Broekel ()

No 2224, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: There are substantial differences across regions regarding COVID-19 infections and deaths, which are partly explained by differences in practicing social distancing. In this paper, we argue that the portrayal of COVID-19 in regional media might be an important factor in explaining regional differences in social distancing. By using mobility as a proxy, and analyzing data on regional news coverage in Germany, we empirically investigate whether the geographical heterogeneity in COVID-19-related news reporting has translated into spatial variations in social distancing. Our results confirm that the frequency of and the element of fear in COVID-19 news has a significant albeit time-varying relationship with social distancing.

Keywords: COVID–19; coronavirus; news media; mobility; regional analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 I12 L82 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-10, Revised 2022-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2224.pdf Version October 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Saved by the news? COVID-19 in German news and its relationship with regional mobility behaviour (2024)
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:egu:wpaper:2224

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).