Publications by authors named "Marc Oliver Rieger"

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has also led to many conspiracy theories. While the origin of the pandemic in China led some, including former US president Donald Trump, to dub the pathogen "Chinese virus" and to support anti-Chinese conspiracy narratives, it caused Chinese state officials to openly support anti-US conspiracy theories about the "true" origin of the virus. In this article, we study whether nationalism, or more precisely uncritical patriotism, is related to belief in conspiracy theories among normal people.

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We conduct an online survey to explore how Chinese people living in Germany perceive and react to group criticism in the context of the debate on the , a chronicle about life during the lockdown in Wuhan. We find that the majority rating of the book is a lukewarm "neither like nor dislike." Most participants are open to criticism in principle and do not agree that the book only spreads so-called "negative-energy".

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The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic puts countries and their governments in an unprecedented situation. Strong countermeasures have been implemented in most places, but how much do people trust their governments in handling this crisis? Using data from a worldwide survey, conducted between March 20th and April 22nd, 2020, with more than 100,000 participants, we study people's perceptions of government reactions in 57 countries. We find that media freedom reduces government trust directly as well as indirectly via a more negative assessment of government reactions as either insufficient or too strict.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused dramatic changes in the way people around the globe live, and has had a profound negative impact on the global economy. Much of this negative impact did not result from the disease itself, but from the lockdown restrictions imposed to contain the spread of the virus. We investigate how national stock market indices reacted to the news of national lockdown restrictions in the period from January to May 2020.

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In a survey among 250 subjects recruited at a German university and predominantly university students, we elicit opinions about social distancing, i. e., the necessity to keep away from other people to slow down the speed of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 epidemics.

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Time preferences are central to human decision making; therefore, a thorough understanding of their international differences is highly relevant. Previous measurements, however, vary widely in their methodology, from questions answered on the Likert scale to lottery-type questions. We show that these different measurements correlate to a large degree and that they have a common factor that can predict a broad spectrum of variables: the countries' credit ratings, gasoline prices (as a proxy for environmental protection), equity risk premiums, and average years of school attendance.

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This data article describes the attitudes of German and Chinese respondents to some measures taken against the COVID-19 pandemic such as social distancing and face masks wearing, as well as their trust in government actions. The data were collected through six online surveys conducted between March 23 to September 15 2020 from 865 participants in Germany, 135 in China and 169 participants with Chinese roots in Germany. The data were partly used in related research papers in which the theoretical background, analysis of the survey variables and the interpretation of the findings are presented in detail [1,2].

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The data article describes self-assessments of 621 Vietnamese retail investors on their trading behavior, psychological attributes and socio-demographic characteristics. The dataset was obtained from a randomized survey of 3144 Vietnamese participants on financial attitudes and practice that has been used in Phan et al. [5].

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