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...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to enormous data movements that strongly affect parameters and forecasts from standard VARs. To address these issues, we propose VAR models with outlier-augmented stochastic volatility (SV) that combine transitory and persistent changes in volatility. The resulting...

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...

As part of the Eurosystem’s annual banknote production planning, the national central banks draw up forecasts estimating the volumes of national-issued banknotes in circulation for the three years ahead. As at the end of 2021, more than 80 per cent of euro banknotes in circulation (cumulated...

We study the role of liquidity management tools (LMTs) in mitigating financial fragility in investment funds during the COVID-19 market distress. We employ a unique dataset that reports the availability of different types of LMTs in a sample of Irish-domiciled corporate bond funds. We find that...