In response to strong revenue and income losses that a large share of the self-employed faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the...

Die Corona-Krise führt bei vielen Unternehmen zu andauernden Umsatzeinbrüchen, die einen akuten Liquiditätsbedarf verursachen, sofern laufende Kosten nicht reduziert werden. Auf Grundlage neuer Daten des German Business Panels wird ein Klassifizierungsverfahren genutzt, das die Kostenstruktur...

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme...

Using an agency framework, this paper examines advantages of offering venture capitalists a choice between public equity and loan schemes. Both schemes can be used to promote venture capital investments in hightechnology enterprises since they encourage inexperienced venture capitalists to...