In this paper we estimate the effect of unemployment on informal care provision. For the identification we use plant closures as a source of exogenous variation and combine difference-in-differences with matching based on entropy balancing. The analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We find that there is a time conflict between employment and informal care provision. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic and related closures of day care centres and schools significantly increased the amount of care work done by parents. There has been much speculation over whether the pandemic increased or decreased gender equality in parental care work. Based on representative data for Germany from spring 2020 and winter 2021 we present an empirical analysis that shows that although gender inequality ...
We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender loneliness gap: women were lonelier than men in 2017, and the 2017-2020 rise in loneliness was far larger for ...
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 impact of this program on the subjective survival probability. In particular, we investigate how the digitalization ...
Based on various data sources, the workshop will examine the economic and psychological situation of the self-employed three years after the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Next to analyzing the immediate impact of the crisis, the workshop will address the adjustment measures taken by the self-employed and the long-term consequences. Possible research questions include what strategies the self...
We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...