Researchers at DIW Berlin are taking a closer look at the economic effects of the ongoing 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Here you can find all DIW Berlin publications on the consequences of the pandemic, which are leaving deep marks on not only the global and German economies, but also on society itself.
Abstract: An increasing body of empirical evidence has documented trends to risen concentration, profits, markups, and market power in many industries across the world since the 1980s. Several factors – such as globalisation, digitisation, the increased role of intangible assets and sunk costs, as well as M&A activity and the (under)enforcement of merger control– have been...
Conference in Bremen, June, 16th, 2020 and Quarterly Journal of Economic Research (DIW Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung) Description Advances in payment technologies have considerably extended the way how we pay for transactions. While the majority of financial transactions has been even traditionally done by the means of non-cash (e.g. equity payments in mergers & acquisitions), nowadays ...
Abstract: I derive an optimal benefit-based corporate tax rate formula as a function of the public input elasticity of profits and the (net of) tax elasticity of profits. I argue that the existence of the corporate income tax should be justified by the benefit-based view of taxation: firms should pay tax according to the benefits they receive from the use of the public input. I argue that...
Abstract: Antibiotic misuse due to prescribing under diagnostic uncertainty is a leading driver of antibiotic resistance. We investigate the magnitude and mechanisms by which machine learning predictions can enable policies that reduce antibiotic misuse. Building on predictions from administrative data on urinary tract infections in Denmark, we evaluate counterfactual policies that replace...
We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the government-mandated measures to contain its spread, affected the self-employed relative to employed individuals in Germany and, secondly, to what extent the female self-employed were more strongly hit than their male counterparts. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data where respondents are asked about ...
During both the 2008 and the COVID crises, aggregate employment in Europe and the US fell despite continuing growth in the aggregate capital stock. Using more than one million firm-year observations of small and medium European firms between 2003 and 2018, this paper introduces new stylized facts on how firms’ relative demand for labor and capital evolved as their capital structure adjusted to the ...
We investigate the importance of firm-bank relationships for the international transmission of bank distress to the real economy. Using a large panel of matched financial statements of firms of all sizes and their relationship banks in Germany, we find that banks with losses from proprietary trading activities during the 2007/8 financial crisis decreased their lending, and that their firm customers ...
The European banking union has so far lacked its third pillar: a joint insurance fund for bank savings deposits. As the present study shows, this could be a major disadvantage in dealing with the economic impact of the corona pandemic. A scenario in which a wave of corporate insolvencies leads to loan and deposit losses reaching six percent over a year would over- whelm Germany’s national deposit insurance ...
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