This paper examines how households adjusted their consumption behavior in response to COVID-19 infection risk during the early phase of the pandemic. We use a monthly consumption survey specifically designed by the German Statistical Office covering the second wave of COVID-19 infections from...

This paper bolsters Prescott's (2004) claim that high taxes are responsible for lacklustre labor market performance in continental European countries. We develop a lifecycle model with endogenous skill formation, endogenous labor supply, and endogenous retirement. Labor taxation distorts not...

We study how the differential timing of local lockdowns due to COVID-19 causally affects households' spending and macroeconomic expectations at the local level using several waves of a customized survey with more than 10,000 respondents. About 50% of survey participants report income and wealth...

We use a repeated large-scale survey of households in the Nielsen Homescan panel to characterize how labor markets are being affected by the covid-19 pandemic. We document several facts. First, job loss has been significantly larger than implied by new unemployment claims: we estimate 20 million...

This paper studies the labor market effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on the Nordic countries which showed one of the highest variations in NPIs despite having similar community spread of COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic: While...

COVID-19 abruptly impacted the labor market with the unemployment rate jumping to 14.7 percent less than two months after state governments began adopting social distancing measures. Unemployment of this magnitude has not been seen since the Great Depression. This paper provides the first study...

We estimate the causal effects of a pandemic-era wage subsidy program in Canada on job losses and business closures. Our estimates use administrative microdata and a regression discontinuity strategy to estimate the effects of marginal changes in the wage subsidy rate. The estimated net wage...

Many European countries restrict immigration from new EU member countries. The rationale is to avoid adverse wage and employment effects. We quantify these effects for Germany. Following Borjas (2003), we estimate a structural model of labor demand, based on elasticities of substitution between...

Using data from the 2006 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes how a minimum wage affects employment, wage inequality, public expenditures, and aggregate income in the low-wage sector. It is shown that a statutory minimum wage of EUR 7.50 per hour would cost...

Do minimum wages reduce in-work-poverty and wage inequality? Or can alternative policies do better? We evaluate theses issues for the exemplary case of Germany that suffers from high unemployment among low-skilled workers and rising wage dispersion at the bottom of the wage distribution. We...