, "Workshop on Recent Developments on Migration Issues" (BETA, Luxembourg), and to the INEQ Research Group meeting. We are grateful to all the participants for their useful hints. We thank the editor Klaus F. Zimmermann and two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions that led to a considerable improvement of the paper. A slightly different version of this work circulated under the title "Hate at first sight? Dynamic aspects of the electoral impact of migration: The case of UK and Brexit" as a SPRU Working Paper. The usual disclaimer applies.

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OECD Countries and the SKILS conference. Stillman also thanks CESifo for hosting him as a visiting fellow.

People typically do not acquire new information about the facts of the economy through consulting official statistics; they read or listen to mediatype reports/stories on the economy where the facts are packaged in a story. This paper tests with an experiment whether the explanatory style used in such media-type stories affects individual decision making. We also compare this particular narrative influence with that of the actual facts contained in the story. Our subjects receive a media-type story about the economy before they play a minimum effort game. The media story has either good or bad background facts about the economy and we use the psychological theory of explanatory styles to present these facts in a narrative style designed to engender either optimism or pessimism. We find evidence that the explanatory style matters more than facts in the sense that optimistic styles support higher equilibria than pessimistic ones while the influence of the facts itself is weaker.