Do Media Narratives of the Economy Affect Childbearing? Findings From Multi-media News Coverage in Germany

The present study posits that economic narratives conveyed by media news outlets shape childbearing, over and above the influence of objective economic constraints. We further advance that this relationship is channeled by individual perceptions of the economy. To test these arguments, we used the amount of negative and positive economic news reported by various German media sources, in combination with microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Our findings show that when the tone of economic news worsens, the probability of conception is reduced, especially among the socioeconomically advantaged groups (e.g., women living in high-income households and those with medium-to-high education). On the contrary, improvements in the news tone were not associated with the probability of conception. A relatively small, but non-negligible, part of the link between economic news and conception operates through shifts in perceptions: negative media coverage worsened economic perceptions that, in turn, reduced the likelihood of conception.