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

Author

Listed:
  • Kummer, Michael
  • Slivko, Olga
  • Zhang, Michael

Abstract

Economic restructuring provides an opportunity for socially valuable product and process innovation. However, it's not clear whether displaced workers engage in socially useful activities as well. This question is particularly pressing when the advancement of computer technology creates the destructive force to replace many jobs with robotic labor and artificial intelligence. Leveraging German district-level and European country-level data we analyze the relationship between the economic crisis in 2008-2010 and a socially useful online activity - contributions to the largest online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find increased contributions to the socially valuable activity in the form of knowledge acquisition and contributions to Wikipedia. We analyze both content generation at the European Country level and at the German district level. For German districts, we observe an increase in the rate of content generation on Wikipedia more severely affected districts. These effects get even stronger in our analysis at the European country level.

Suggested Citation

  • Kummer, Michael & Slivko, Olga & Zhang, Michael, 2017. "Economic downturn and volunteering: Do economic crises affect content generation on Wikipedia?," ZEW Discussion Papers 15-078 [rev.], ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, revised 2017.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:15078r
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Marit Hinnosaar & Toomas Hinnosaar & Michael E. Kummer & Olga Slivko, 2022. "Externalities in knowledge production: evidence from a randomized field experiment," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 25(2), pages 706-733, April.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    online platform; Wikipedia; public goods; unemployment; user generated content;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D29 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Other
    • D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • J60 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - General
    • L17 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Open Source Products and Markets

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