Almost all countries worldwide closed schools at the outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis. I document that schooling time dropped on average by -55% in the US and -45% in Germany from the onset of the crisis to the summer of 2021. In the US, schools were closed longer in richer than in poorer areas,...

When workers are displaced from their jobs in mass layoffs or firm closures, they experience lasting adverse labor market consequences. We study how these consequences vary with the amount of skill mismatch that workers experience when returning to the labor market. Using novel measures of skill...

We study the effect of monetary surprise shocks on real output and the price level, conditioned on different fiscal sustainability regimes in the period 2001Q4-2021Q4. First, we estimate time-varying fiscal sustainability coefficients based on Bohn's (1998) approach through Schlicht's (2003)...

We evaluate Germany's temporary value-added tax (VAT) rate reduction as a tool to stimulate consumer spending during the Covid-19 pandemic using a comparative case study approach. We construct a credible counterfactual for Germany in a two-step procedure. First, we carry out a careful...

This paper investigates the impact of the largest rail strikes in German history on intercity buses - a then newly liberalised market. Using unique booking data of bus services, we exploit variation in rail service cancellations across routes to show that the disruption in rail transport...

Why do public policies change little over time in individual places, sometimes for centuries? We investigate different mechanisms for policy persistence. Several city mayors serving in democratic Weimar Germany were expelled by the Nazis in 1933, but re-installed by the Allies after World War...

In the Covid-19 crisis, most OECD countries have used short-time work (subsidized working time reductions) to preserve employment relationships. This paper studies whether short-time work can save jobs through stabilizing aggregate demand in recessions. First, we show that the consumption risk...

We investigate the employment consequences of deindustrialization for 1,993 cities in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and the United States. In all six countries we find a strong negative relationship between a city's share of manufacturing employment in the year of its country's...