An economy's ability to resist adverse shocks, such as an economic recession or natural disaster, is associated with its financial system structure due to different countercyclical funding capabilities. This paper uses a novel database of bank headquarter locations in a cross-country comparison...

Despite its universal nature, the impact of COVID-19 has not been geographically homogeneous. While certain countries and regions have been severely affected, registering record infection rates and excess deaths, others experienced only milder outbreaks. We investigate to what extent human...

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has a severe impact on societies, economies and labor markets. However, not all countries, socio-economic groups and sectors within all countries are equally affected. Part of this difference can be related to the different role and extent of short-time work,...

The main problem facing policymakers during the corona virus pandemic is how to mitigate its humanitarian and economic costs. Doing so invariably involves trading off some costs against others as well as short-term against longer-term consequences. We provide an overview of economic literature...

In this paper, we discuss 10 parallels between the lack of preparation of financial system regulators prior to the GFC and the lack of preparation by public health authorities and governments prior to Covid-19. These parallels relate to: required stocks (of capital or equipment), data collection...

This paper examines the speed with which governments introduced lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data on daily confirmed COVID-19 cases and related deaths combined with information on containment measures available for 124 countries as well as a range of annual...

This paper studies the impulse responses of output and private consumption to the COVID-19 stimulus packages in the U.S. I develop a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) to calculate the orthogonalized impulse response functions (OIRFs) of output and private consumption to a government...