Unemployment and Digital Public Goods Contribution

Michael Kummer (), Olga Slivko and Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang ()
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Michael Kummer: University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom; Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332; ZEW–Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, 68161 Mannheim, Germany
Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang: Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong

Information Systems Research, 2020, vol. 31, issue 3, 801-819

Abstract: Economic crises often result in massive job loss. However, although reduced employment has been shown to have many negative consequences for the affected individuals, it may also push them into new activities, such as provision of service to their communities. In this paper, we show how individuals engage in socially useful activities after an increase in unemployment. Specifically we document increased online content generation at Wikipedia, the world’s largest user generated knowledge repository. Leveraging German district-level and European country-level unemployment data we analyze the relationship between the economic crisis in 2008–2010 and contributions to Wikipedia. For both data sets we find increased socially valuable activity in the form of knowledge acquisition and contributions to Wikipedia. For German districts, we observe an increased rate of content generation on Wikipedia in districts that faced greater increases in unemployment. The effect of unemployment on content generation is even stronger at the European country level. Our findings suggest that public goods provision increases as a positive side effect of economic crises.

Keywords: online platform; public goods; unemployment; user-generated content; Wikipedia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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