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This paper studies the labor market effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on the Nordic countries which showed one of the highest variations in NPIs despite having similar community spread of COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic: While Denmark, Finland and Norway imposed strict measures (`lock...
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Context 1
... contrast, Sweden decided for much less strict measures, with restaurants and bars kept open (under certain proximity restrictions), and private businesses and shops being allowed to operate freely. In fact, Google's COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports show different mobility patterns for Sweden than for the other three countries, especially in the first weeks after the lockdowns (see Figure 1). We also observe a decline in Sweden. ...
Context 2
... we find a very large increase in Denmark exactly around the time of the lockdown in week 11, and for Sweden a similar but somewhat less strong increase around 2 to 3 weeks thereafter. In sum, the results from the unemployment and furlough data mirror the pattern from the Google mobility data shown in Figure 1: The lockdowns of Norway and Denmark seem to have had the largest impact, followed by Finland and Sweden. Furthermore, even after lifting the lockdown, neither everyday life as recorded in the Google data nor the labor market returned immediately back to normal, but rather recovered only gradually from it. ...
Context 3
... looking at the combined measure (panel d ), we again find that the labor markets of Denmark and Norway seem to have suffered the most. This mirrors what we have already observed in the mobility data shown in Figure 1: The lockdowns of Norway and Denmark seem to have had the largest impact, followed by Finland and Sweden. ...
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Using harmonized administrative data from Scandinavia, we find that intergenerational rank associations in income have increased uniformly across Sweden, Denmark, and Norway for cohorts born between 1951 and 1979. Splitting these trends by gender, we find that father-son mobility has been stable, while family correlations for mothers and daughters...
Faced with rising levels of cross-border migration, many countries have extended local voting rights to non-citizen residents. However, empirical evidence indicates that voter turnout among non-naturalized immigrants is lower when compared to citizens. This raises the question of how to explain this difference. A common answer is that the low turno...
This paper studies the labor market effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on the Nordic countries which showed one of the highest variations in NPIs despite having similar community spread of COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic: While Denmark, Finland and Norway imposed strict measures ('lock...
Citations
... However, the academic discussion has again focused on the validity of these instruments as a defence of employment against traditional systems. Juranek et al. (2020) analyses layoffs during the COVID-19 crisis in Norway using administrative data, demonstrating that the FWS limited the impact of the pandemic. e work of Stuart et al. (2021) shows that the FWS system has helped retain jobs in the United Kingdom and should be implemented as part of companies' human resources policies for workforce retention. ...
Official statistics indicated a break in Okun’s law in all the Spanish regions due to the COVID-19 pandemic; however, herein, evidence of the validity of the law is shown. The temporary layoff procedures (ERTEs) allowed many workers to maintain their jobs. From the productive point of view, the law remained in effect in the regions, showing a strong relationship between idle labour resources and economic activity, and from the social point of view, the apparent breakdown of the law can be interpreted as the implementation of a policy that mitigated the dramatic impact of the economic crisis.
... For instance, a study conducted in the United States of America (USA) estimated the median direct medical cost of a single symptomatic COVID-19 case to be US $3045 during the infection period alone [8]. Additionally, indirect costs arising from the pandemic, such as lost productivity due to morbidity and mortality, reduced consumer spending, and supply chain disruptions, could be substantial in certain countries [9]. Studies by Maltezou et al. and Faramarzi et al. revealed that absenteeism costs accounted for a large proportion (80.4%) of total costs [10] and estimated an average cost of US $671.4 per patient [11], respectively. ...
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a considerable threat to the economics of patients, health systems, and society.
Objectives
This meta-analysis aims to quantitatively assess the global economic burden of COVID-19.
Methods
A comprehensive search was performed in the PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases to identify studies examining the economic impact of COVID-19. The selected studies were classified into two categories based on the cost-of-illness (COI) study approach: top-down and bottom-up studies. The results of top-down COI studies were presented by calculating the average costs as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) and health expenditures. Conversely, the findings of bottom-up studies were analyzed through meta-analysis using the standardized mean difference.
Results
The implemented search strategy yielded 3271 records, of which 27 studies met the inclusion criteria, consisting of 7 top-down and 20 bottom-up studies. The included studies were conducted in various countries, including the USA (5), China (5), Spain (2), Brazil (2), South Korea (2), India (2), and one study each in Italy, South Africa, the Philippines, Greece, Iran, Kenya, Nigeria, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The results of the top-down studies indicated that indirect costs represent 10.53% of GDP, while the total estimated cost accounts for 85.91% of healthcare expenditures and 9.13% of GDP. In contrast, the bottom-up studies revealed that the average direct medical costs ranged from US $1264 to US $79,315. The meta-analysis demonstrated that the medical costs for COVID-19 patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) were approximately twice as high as those for patients in general wards, with a range from 0.05 to 3.48 times higher.
Conclusions
Our study indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a significant economic burden worldwide, with varying degrees of impact across countries. The findings of our study, along with those of other research, underscore the vital role of economic consequences in the post-COVID-19 era for communities and families. Therefore, policymakers and health administrators should prioritize economic programs and accord them heightened attention.
... In many countries, the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on people's lives (Brodeur et al., 2021) and the economy (Almeida et al., 2021;Juranek et al., 2021;Palomino et al., 2020;Coad et al., 2022;Bloom et al., 2022). The pandemic influenced businesses deeply in Germany as well. ...
... The need to minimise trade-offs became evident in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic control measures, such as stay-at-home orders and the closure of non-essential businesses, proved to be effective in controlling the spread of the COVID-19 virus, thus contributing to the combat of communicable diseases as set forth in SDG 3.3 (Conyon et al., 2020;Dave et al., 2021;Fang et al., 2020;Juranek et al., 2020). However, these intervention policies also had a negative impact or even reversed progress on a considerable number of economic and social objectives, such as SDG 1 on combating poverty, SDG 2 on ensuring food security (Sumner et al., 2020;WFP, 2020), SDG 4 on providing quality education (Psacharopoulos et al., 2020;UNESCO, 2020), SDG 8 on promoting sustained economic growth (World Bank, 2020), and SDG 16 on advocating for peace, justice, and strong institutions (e.g. ...
... Furthermore, times of economic hardship can have an increasing effect on entrepreneurial activity (Amorós et al., 2019;Huang et al., 2020) and in this regard, the pandemic had a drastic impact on the global economy with entire industries being shut down (e.g. hospitality, tourism) and a strong increase in unemployment rates (Adams-Prassl et al., 2020;Alstadsaeter et al., 2020;Bauer & Weber, 2020;Bick & Blandin, 2020;Cho & Winters, 2020;Davidsson et al., 2021;Juranek et al., 2020). ...
With the rise of digital platforms, individuals’ possibilities to generate income have increased drastically. In this context, we present digital content creation as a form of (digital) entrepreneurship that is characterized by potentially high but also uncertain revenues. As the cost structure of content creation mostly depends on opportunity costs, it stands in contrast to other popular platform-work options. We demonstrate how a stark and unexpected reduction in opportunity costs affects the actual decision to produce digital content. Exploiting the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we measure how individuals (streamers) who operate on a live streaming platform, respond to a sudden change in external factors while accounting for individual differences in initial conditions. We observe intensified efforts across the spectrum of streamers and find particularly strong reactions from newcomer streamers. We further show that only the most successful newcomers sustain their increased efforts even when opportunity costs start to rise again. Our results are consistent with the initial assumption that an individual’s decision on taking up or intensifying entrepreneurial efforts on digital platforms is strongly affected by their opportunity costs. The results further imply that there is a large potential in individuals who might be willing to become entrepreneurs but are restricted by external conditions. As platform-based digital entrepreneurship offers high flexibility and very low entry barriers, measures for lowering opportunity costs could therefore help to unleash this potential. To maintain a steady influx of new talents, content platforms should increase their support for smaller creators and policymakers should provide easily accessible platforms to ease the way into entrepreneurship for these individuals.
... The comparison should be made with caution given that until recently, these types of schemes have not been analysed in depth, and we still do not have sufficient historical perspective for their assessment. For the Norwegian case, Juranek et al. (2020) analyse layoffs during the COVID-19 crisis using administrative data, demonstrating that the FWS limited the impact of the pandemic. The work of Stuart et al. (2021) shows that the FWS system has served to retain jobs in the United Kingdom and that it should be implemented within the human resources policy of companies as a measure of workforce retention. ...
Official statistics indicated a break in Okun's law in all the Spanish regions due to the COVID-19 pandemic; however, herein, evidence of the validity of the law is shown. The temporary layoff procedures (ERTE) allowed many workers to maintain their jobs. From the productive point of view, the law remained in effect in the regions, showing a strong relationship between idle labour resources and economic activity, and from the social point of view, the apparent breakdown of the law can be interpreted as the implementation of a policy that mitigated the dramatic impact of the economic crisis.
... Nicht berücksichtigt wurde dabei jedoch, dass die schwedische Wirtschaft sehr exportabhängig ist und dass die Epidemie zudem auch das Konsumverhalten der Bevölkerung deutlich hat zurückgehen lassen [23]. Die Arbeitslosigkeit ist in Schweden während der Pandemie deutlich angestiegen, wenngleich weniger stark als in den nordischen Nachbarländern [24]. Wie sich dies längerfristig auswirken wird, bleibt abzuwarten. ...
... There are also various studies investigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on overall employment(Forsythe et al., 2020;Chetty et al., 2020;Cajner et al., 2020;Juranek et al., 2020;Coibion et al., 2020;Adams-Prassl et al., 2020). ...
Inequalities in health are a prevalent feature of societies. And as societies, we condemn inequalities that are rooted in immutable circumstances such as gender, race, and parental background. Consequently, policy makers are interested in measuring and understanding the causes of health inequalities rooted in circumstances. However, identifying causal estimates of these relationships is very ambitious for reasons such as the presence of confounders or measurement error in the data. This thesis contributes to this ambitious endeavour by addressing these challenges in four chapters. In the first Chapter, I use 25 years of rich health information to describe three features of intergenerational health mobility in Germany. First, we describe the joint permanent health distribution of the parents and their children. A ten percentile increase in parental permanent health is associated with a 2.3 percentile increase in their child’s health. Second, a percentile point increase in permanent health ranks is associated with a 0.8% to 1.4% increase in permanent income for, both, children, and parents, respectively. Non-linearities in the association between permanent health and income create incentives to escape the bottom of the permanent health distribution. Third, upward mobility in permanent health varies with parental socio-economic status. In the second Chapter, we estimate the effect of maternal schooling on children’s mental health in adulthood. Using the Socio-Economic Panel and the mental health measure based on the SF-12 questionnaire, we exploit a compulsory schooling law reform to identify the causal effect of maternal schooling on children’s mental health. While the theoretical considerations are not clear, we do not find that the mother’s schooling has an effect on the mental health of the children. However, we find a positive effect on children’s physical health operating mainly through physical functioning. In addition, albeit with the absence of a reduced-form effect on mental health, we find evidence that the number of friends moderates the relationship between maternal schooling and their children’s mental health. In the third Chapter, against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity design in time to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Component Summary score and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 score. The effects are stronger for refugees with closer geographic proximity to the focal hate crime and refugees with low country-specific human capital. While the estimated effect is only transitory, we argue that negative mental health shocks during the critical period after arrival have important long-term consequences. In the last Chapter of this thesis, we investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed – particularly women– in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher likelihood of income losses due to COVID-19 than employees, women are 35% more likely to experience income losses than their male counterparts. We do not find a comparable gender gap among employees. Our results further suggest that the gender gap among the self-employed is largely explained by the fact that women disproportionately work in industries that are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis of potential mechanisms reveals that women are significantly more likely to be impacted by government-imposed restrictions, e.g., the regulation of opening hours. We conclude that future policy measures intending to mitigate the consequences of such shocks should account for this considerable variation in economic hardship.
... Sweden's example has shown that even when business and social mobility constraint policies differ in model from the rest of the world are applied, the negative socio-economic consequences cannot be avoided. As research by Juranek et al. (2020) in Scandinavian countries found out, the situation has worsened to the same degree in Sweden as in neighbouring countries, only with a delay of 2 to 3 weeks. ...
... The research has also shown that people's employment expectations were more positive in countries where the spread of Covid-19 was lesser in scope and government applied less restrictive quarantine constraints on social contacts and organizations' activities, causing the unemployment curve to be smoother than in countries which were impacted worse by the Covid-19. Our research confirmed Juranek's et al. (2020) observation that countries cannot exist as separate islands in the global economy during the pandemic. Sooner or later, the situation becomes similar to that of neighbouring countries. ...
The sentiment indicators tend to reflect better the social tensions caused by COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, the aim of this paper is to reflect the relationship between employment expectations and tensions related to new coronavirus. The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on employment expectations is assessed using the data collected by Google Trends in Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (panel ARDL) models and Bayesian multilevel model. The results indicated that COVID-19 searched on Google had a negative impact on employment expectations in the EU New Member States on the period March 2020-May 2021. The unemployment and inflation rate had also a negative effect, while improvement in economic sentiment indicator has increased the employment expectations. These results are the support of economic policies to reduce labour market tensions and improve employment expectations.
... P r e p r i n t n o t p e e r r e v i e w e d shows that this pandemic and related containment measures (i.e., "shelter-in-place" and "stayat-home") started to measurably affect people's behavior in the USA, Germany, France and Italy in March 2020. Furthermore, the COVID-19 crisis had dramatic effects on employment (Adams-Prassl, Boneva, Golin, & Rauh, 2020;Alstadsaeter et al., 2020;Bauer & Weber, 2020;Bick & Blandin, 2020;Juranek, Paetzold, Winner, & Zoutman, 2020), also illustrated in Figure 5. While a small but steady increase can be observed for the German market, a sharp increase in just a few weeks led to a 10-percentage point increase in unemployment in the USA, putting more than ten million Americans out of work. ...
