We study the impact of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution on the spread and severity of COVID-19 in Germany. We combine data on county-by-day level on confirmed cases and deaths with information on local air quality and weather conditions and exploit short-term variation in the...

Using a gravity-like approach, we study how Covid-19 deaths and lockdown policies affected countries’ imports from China during 2020. We find that a country’s own Covid-19 deaths and lockdowns significantly reduced its imports from China, suggesting that the negative demand effects prevailed...

This paper analyses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on stock market returns and their volatility in the case of the G20 countries. In contrast to the existing empirical literature, which typically focuses only on either Covid-19 deaths or lockdown policies, our analysis is based on a...

Developments in trade finance in 2020 were largely driven by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Twelve years after the great financial crisis of 2008-09, the issue of trade finance reemerged as a matter of urgency. While the current pandemic-related crisis did not have a financial cause, one...

Early non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) significantly reduced the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there are vast differences in how quickly governments implemented NPIs. In this paper, we analyze the role of public attention, measured as the share of daily Google searches in a...