Current Research
List viewEconomists from around the world are using real time data collection to better understand the impact the Covid-19 crisis is having on families, workers, firms and society, and how policies can help the recovery out of the crisis. Find out more about how these research teams are carrying out their projects, and what their findings are below.
Covid-19-related school closures: impact on students in their final high school years
Students in their final high school years are faced with long lasting career decisions under high uncertainty and they are pressured to perform well in their high-stake exams. The government regulations following the Covid-19 pandemic such as school ...
Primary Topic: Schools, universities & training
Lead investigator: Malte Sandner
Countries
Consumer responses to the Covid-19 crisis: evidence from bank account transaction data
This paper uses transaction-level customer data from the largest bank in Denmark to estimate consumer responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and the partial shutdown of the economy. We find that aggregate card spending has dropped sharply by around 25% f...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Asger Lau Anderson
Countries
Pandemics meet democracy. experimental evidence from the Covid-19 crisis in Spain
The Covid-19 outbreak poses an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies. Despite the global scale of the problem, the response has been mainly national, and global coordination has been so far extremely weak. All over the world government...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Francesc Amat
Countries
Adoption of telework and e-learning during Covid-19 lockdown
This paper studies: a) the impact of Covid-19 lockdown measures on the adoption of teleworking and e-learning, and b) its socioeconomic determinants. Using real-time data on Google search Trends aggregated at the province level in Italy, I study how ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Marta C Lopes
Countries
Analysis of websites regarding firms’ reactions to corona pandemic in Germany
We analyze websites of about 1.3 Mio. firms in Germany twice a week searching for the term Corona and synonyms of it. Since our first collection of data on March 19th, 2020, the share of firms mentioning the pandemic raised by two percentage points w...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Peter Winker
Countries
Staying home saves lives, really!
As coronavirus disease (Covid-19) is spreading around the world, many national and local governments have imposed social restrictive measures to limit the spread of the virus. Such quarantine measures in different cities across the world have brought...
Primary Topic: Crime & policing
Lead investigator: Soheil Shayegh
Countries
Nowcasting Norwegian household consumption with debit card transaction data
The recent shutdown of significant portions of the worldwide economy, in order to restrain the outbreak of the coronavirus, has triggered a global recession. The uncertain consequences of the rapid spread of the virus and the induced infection contro...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Knut Are Aastveit
Countries
On the effects of Covid-19 on online labour markets: empirical evidence from Europe
In online labour market platforms, projects can be posted and completed anywhere in the world. They are – intensified by Covid-19 – at the core of the debate about the future of work and the conditions under which we work online. Using unique com...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Frank Mueller-Langer
Market reactions to the arrival and containment of Covid-19: an event study
We study the short-term market reactions of US and European stocks during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Employing an event study, we document that stocks react significantly negative to the announcement of the first death in a given country...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Thomas Heyden
How the Covid-19 lockdown affected gender inequality in paid and unpaid work in Spain
The Covid-19 pandemic led many countries to close schools and declare lockdowns during the spring of 2020, with important impacts on the labor market. We document the effects of the Covid-19 lockdown in spain, which was hit early and hard by the pand...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Lidia Farre
Countries
Volatility shocks and investment behavior
We investigate how volatility shocks influence investments into a risky asset, perceptions about the asset’s risk, its future price/return development, and investor satisfaction. We run investment experiments mimicking volatility shocks with two su...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Christoph Huber
Countries
Compulsory face mask policies do not affect community mobility in Germany
There is currently a heated debate about making face masks compulsory in public spaces to contain Covid-19. A key concern is that such policies could lead to risk compensating behaviour and thereby undermine efforts to maintain social distancing and ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Roxanne Kovacs
Countries
Human behaviour, cultural narratives and the economy during and after Covid-19
This project focuses on the Culture-Based Development (CBD) aspects of the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. It analyses cultural biases created through narratives and conveying old social constructs that generate socio-economic inequalities during an...
Primary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Annie Tubadji
Countries
The sooner, the better: the early economic impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic
The size of the economic shocks triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic and the effects of the associated non-pharmaceutical interventions have not been fully assessed because the official economic indicators have not been published. This paper provides e...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Asli Demirgüç-Kunt
How effective are social distancing policies? evidence on the fight against Covid-19 from Germany
To fight the spread of Covid-19, many countries implemented unprecedented social distancing policies. This is the first paper that uses an event-study approach to examine the effects of the German social distancing policies on (a) individual behavior...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Ulrich Glogowsky
Countries
Economic determinants of violence in the home: the case of Sweden during Covid-19
Violence within the home is the most common form of interpersonal violence for women. While children and men are also victims of abuse of various kind within the family, intimate partner violence (IPV) committed by men against women is generally the ...
Primary Topic: Crime & policing
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Maria Perrota
Countries
Does the EU convergence machine still work and how will the Covid-19 crisis impact it?
Economic convergence has been one of the explicit goals of the EU from its very beginning. The prospect of higher living standards has undeniably been a major attraction of EU membership. Conversely, economic divergence may undermine support for the ...
Primary Topic: Nations, regions & cities
Secondary Topic: Public spending, taxes & debt
Lead investigator: Patrick Bisciari
Covid-19, the stability of preferences and environmental choices
Recent studies and surveys show that Covid-19 not only poses a threat to individuals’ physical health, but also threatens individuals’ mental health due to income and employment losses, changes in daily routines and the general increased fear and...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Andreas Loschel
Countries
The impact of Covid-19 on paid and unpaid work in the family: an international comparison
The Covid-19 pandemic has led governments worldwide to lock down their counties for several weeks. With the aim to curb the spread of the virus, most people have had to stay at home, working from their dwelling, and schools are closed. The quarantine...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Lídia Farré
The physical cost of the Covid-19 lockdown for non-professional athletes.
We analyze the participation of non-professional athletes (NPAs) to sporting events (road cycling or running) that take place annually in Italy or the UK (further countries may be added later, depending on data availability). The Covid-19 lockdown in...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Tommaso Reggiani
