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...

This paper studies the spread of the Black Death as a proxy for the ow of medieval trade between 1346 and 1351. The Black Death struck most areas of Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Based on a modified version of the gravity model, we estimate the speed (in kilometers per day) of transmission...

Employment responses to the COVID-19 crisis differed widely across German local labour markets at the beginning of the pandemic, with differences in short-time work rates of up to 20 percentage points. We show that digital capital, and to a lesser extent working-from-home, were essential for the...

Das Projekt „Airbus" war lange Zeit aufgrund der hohen Subventionierung umstritten. Die Kritik hat sich gelegt, weil inzwischen meist angenommen wird, daß die Airbus-Industrie keine substantielle staatliche Förderung mehr erfährt. Wie umfangreich ist die staatliche Förderung aber tatsächlich?