Forschung zu COVID-19: Projekte des IZA

Digital Tools to Facilitate Job Search During the COVID-19 Pandemics

This project investigates how online job search assistance affects the labor market performance of unemployed workers during the COVID-19 crisis in Denmark. In a large-scale randomized controlled trial, the researchers exogenously vary the content of an online information dashboard on the central online platform of the Danish Public Employment Agency. Treatments differ in whether unemployed workers receive personalized information about the number of available vacancies for the occupations considered by the individual job seeker, information about alternative occupations that potentially are a “good fit” given the job seekers’ background, or both. The study examines the effectiveness of the online job search assistance tool among workers who are unemployed during the crisis, and investigates the stability of employment relationships that were generated before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Face Masks Considerably Reduce COVID-19 Cases in Germany: A Synthetic Control Method Approach

This study uses the synthetic control method to analyze the effect of face masks on the spread of Covid-19 in Germany. The identification approach exploits regional variation in the point in time when face masks became compulsory. Depending on the region we analyse, the authors find that face masks reduced the cumulative number of registered Covid-19 cases between 2.3% and 13% over a period of 10 days after they became compulsory. Assessing the credibility of the various estimates, the researchers conclude that face masks reduce the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 40%.

Face Masks Considerably Reduce COVID-19 Cases in Germany: A Synthetic Control Method Approach

Should Contact Bans Be Lifted in Germany? A Quantitative Prediction of Its Effects

Many countries consider the lifting of restrictions of social contacts (RSC). This study quantifies the effects of RSC for Germany. The authors initially employ a purely statistical approach to predicting prevalence of COVID19 if RSC were upheld after April 20. They employ these findings and feed them into a theoretical model. The paper finds that the peak of the number of sick individuals would be reached already in April. The number of sick individuals would fall below 1,000 at the beginning of July. When restrictions are lifted completely on April 20, the number of sick should rise quickly again from around April 27. A balance between economic and individual costs of RSC and public health objectives consists in lifting RSC for activities that have high economic benefits but low health costs. In the absence of large-scale representative testing of CoV-2 infections, these activities can most easily be identified if federal states of Germany adopted exit strategies that differ across states.

Should Contact Bans Be Lifted in Germany? A Quantitative Prediction of Its Effects

Projecting the Spread of COVID-19 for Germany

This study models the evolution of the number of individuals that are reported to be sick with COVID-19 in Germany. The theoretical framework builds on a continuous time Markov chain with four states: healthy without infection, sick, healthy after recovery or after infection but without symptoms and dead. The quantitative solution matches the number of sick individuals up to the most recent observation and ends with a share of sick individuals following from infection rates and sickness probabilities. The researchers employ this framework to study inter alia the expected peak of the number of sick individuals in a scenario without public regulation of social contacts. The authors also study the effects of public regulations. For all scenarios the expected end of the CoV-2 epidemic is reported.

Projecting the Spread of COVID-19 for Germany

Job Search in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This project studies beliefs about job finding probabilities and actual job search behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic using rich panel data from the Netherlands. The researchers focus on unemployed individuals but also elicit beliefs about job finding rates for the employed in hypothetical settings and for respondents who expect to lose their job in the near future. The study also surveys the importance of a wide range of job characteristics and examines how these may have changed due to the pandemic.

The Impact of Job Disruptions on Households During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This project studies the costs of job disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany for one group that faces particularly daunting challenges: households and in particular families with children. The researchers are seeking to answer two key research questions: First, what are the costs of job disruptions, which are defined as including job displacement, furloughs, involuntary part time, and short time work, at the household level, where one or both partners may experience a disruption? Second, to what extent do the labor market effects of these disruptions differ between men and women? The cornerstone of the project is to combine rich social security data with a targeted survey to construct a high quality data frame to study these questions. A key piece of the analysis will be to investigate the effects of job disruptions on a number of labor market outcomes using an event study type analysis.

Covid-19 School Closures and the Resilience of Low-SES Children

This study will survey the parents and children of the Bonn Family Panel about their behavior and experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. The children’s survey will contain a module on cognitive and non-cognitive skill development as well as a module on information literacy, i.e. the proneness of children to fake news. The parental questionnaire will additionally contain modules on labor market experiences during the pandemic. The survey data will be used in combination with the original RCT to analyze in how far the mentoring intervention has led to higher resilience during the crisis.

Parenting and Home Schooling during the Pandemic

This project surveys parents of about 1000 Dutch children about parental investments during the school closures through time use and monetary investments, school-parent interaction and subjective beliefs about effects of the school closures on children’s well-being. The rich background data of the underlying panel survey allows the researchers to analyze gaps in these factors by socio-economic status, parental education and migrant status, as well as by whether labor market shocks by the pandemic have affected parenting behavior, too. In the longer run, the project will be able to merge the survey data on contemporary mechanisms during the crisis with administrative data to trace effects into objective outcomes on educational performance.

Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 Related Job Loss on Children's Outcomes

The Covid-19 crisis has had an immediate impact on children’s education through school closures and exam cancellations. But evidence shows that a child’s education suffers when a parent’s job becomes insecure or is lost. Especially children in disadvantaged households are likely to suffer most due to school closures and parental job loss might exacerbate these inequalities further. This project will investigate the impact of parental job loss and insecurity on children’s educational outcomes using British survey data linked with national pupil records. The research team will study the immediate impact of job loss or felt job insecurity on parents‘ mental health and ability to provide home schooling using special survey waves being conducted since April 2020.

Digital Admission Procedures during COVID-19

This project develops a multiple-events model and exploits within and between country variation in the timing, type and level of intensity of various public policies to study their dynamic effects on the daily incidence of COVID-19 and on population mobility patterns across 135 countries. The authors remove concurrent policy bias by taking into account the contemporaneous presence of multiple interventions. The main result is that cancelling public events and imposing restrictions on private gatherings followed by school closures have quantitatively the most pronounced effects on reducing the daily incidence of COVID-19. They are followed by workplace as well as stay-at-home requirements, whose statistical significance and levels of effect are not as pronounced. Instead, the study finds no effects for international travel controls, public transport closures and restrictions on movements across cities and regions. The authors establish that these findings are mediated by their effect on population mobility patterns in a manner consistent with time-use and epidemiological factors.

Lockdown Strategies, Mobility Patterns and COVID-19

This project develops a multiple-events model and exploits within and between country variation in the timing, type and level of intensity of various public policies to study their dynamic effects on the daily incidence of COVID-19 and on population mobility patterns across 135 countries. The authors remove concurrent policy bias by taking into account the contemporaneous presence of multiple interventions. The main result is that cancelling public events and imposing restrictions on private gatherings followed by school closures have quantitatively the most pronounced effects on reducing the daily incidence of COVID-19. They are followed by workplace as well as stay-at-home requirements, whose statistical significance and levels of effect are not as pronounced. Instead, the study finds no effects for international travel controls, public transport closures and restrictions on movements across cities and regions. The authors establish that these findings are mediated by their effect on population mobility patterns in a manner consistent with time-use and epidemiological factors.

Lockdown Strategies, Mobility Patterns and COVID-19

Labor Supply in the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Empirical Evidence on Hours, Home Office, and Expectations

Using a survey module administered in late March 2020, this project analyzes how working hours change under the social distancing regulations enacted to fight the CoViD-19 pandemic. The authors study the Netherlands, which are a prototypical Western European country, both in terms of its welfare system and its response to the pandemic. The study shows that total hours decline and more so for the self-employed and those with lower educational degrees. The education gradient appears because workers with a tertiary degree work a much higher number of hours from home. The strength of this effect is dampened by the government defining some workers to be essential for the working of the economy. Across sectors, the researchers show that there are two clusters: One dominated by office-type occupations with high shares of academics, home-office hours, and low fractions of essential workers; and one where manual tasks and social interactions are prevalent with low shares of academics, home office hours, and often high shares of essential workers. Short-term expectations show that workers expect current patterns to prevail and that they expect a lot from government support schemes. In particular, many workers expect to keep their jobs in early June due to government support and the expected unemployment response is far lower than in the US or the UK.

Labour Supply in the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Empirical Evidence on Hours, Home Office, and Expectations

Perceptions of Government Response at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Mental Well-Being

This project conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic between March 20 and April 7 to explore how beliefs about citizens’ and government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic affected mental well-being. The analyses reveal three findings. First, many respondents indicate that their country’s citizens and government’s response was insufficient. Second, respondents’ perception of an insufficient public and government response and handling is associated with lower mental well-being. Third, the research team exploits time variation in country-level lockdown announcements, both around the world and through an event-study in the UK, and finds that strong government actions e.g., announcing a nationwide lockdown were related to an improvement in respondents’ views of their fellow citizens and government, and to better mental well-being. These findings suggest that policy-makers may not only need to consider how their decisions affect the spread of COVID-19, but also how such choices influence the mental well-being of their population.

Perceptions of an Insufficient Government Response at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic are Associated with Lower Mental Well-Being

Pandemic meets Pollution: Poor Air Quality and COVID-19 Severity in Germany

This project studies the impact of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution on the severity of COVID-19 in Germany. The authors combine data on county-by-day level on confirmed cases and deaths with information on local air quality and weather conditions and exploit short-term variation in the concentration of particulate matter (PM10) and Ozone. The study finds significant positive effects of PM10 concentration on COVID-19 deaths for elderly population (80+ years) after the onset of the illness. In addition, air pollution also seems to trigger increases in number of confirmed cases of COVID-19.

Pandemic Meets Pollution: Poor Air Quality Increases Deaths by COVID-19

Training, Mentorship, and the Empowerment of Women: Evidence from an RCT in Egypt

Youth unemployment, especially among women, is high in several developing countries. In 2016, the authors have run a randomized experiment of a bundle of services to help young women in rural Egypt start their own micro-enterprises. The intervention provided a treatment group with business training, training on a skill (e.g. livestock rearing, tailoring, construction, etc.), in addition to a small grant and a small loan. A second treatment group got the same bundle as well as personalized mentorship support. These two treatments were compared to a randomized control group. 6-12 months later the researchers found large positive impacts of the two treatment arms on business entrepreneurship, income, subjective well-being, and decision making power. The project has secured funding to collect longer term data on these individuals 4 years after the implementation and just in the wake of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic to examine if these impacts sustain over the long-run.

Has COVID-19 Accelerated the Digital Transformation on the Labor Market?

This project investigates whether the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation. Research will study how the firm-level relationship between technology adoption and labor demand has changed with the COVID-19 crisis and whether technologically more advanced firms are less affected. The project will exploit a new data base that includes pre- and post-crises survey information on technology adoption at the firm-level in Germany and which is linked to administrative data records from the Federal Employment Agency. The data base allows unique firm-level investigations on how firms and workers adopt to COVID-19 shock in digitalization.

IZA Crisis Response Monitoring

The current COVID-19 crisis highlights long-standing institutional issues in a situation characterized by permanent change, global interactions and technological change so that the crisis might trigger long-term adjustments in order to make welfare states and employment systems more resilient, reducing the need for further emergency measures. The main objective of the project is to understand why and how countries respond differently to the COVID-19 shock and to what extent they can actually make their institutional settings more resilient. Empirically, the running IZA crisis response monitoring, jointly run by IZA and a number of country experts from the IZA Network provides up-to-date evidence on labor market and social consequences of COVID-19, on institutional reforms and their effects.

Crisis Response Monitoring

COVID-19 Impact Lab

Based on the LISS data, a representative survey of the Dutch population, the Covid-19 Impact Lab pursues a near-real-time monitoring of how people respond to the Covid-19 crisis and the implemented countermeasures to the pandemic. The surveys cover a multitude of topics, such like knowledge and expectations about the pandemic, labor supply, economic expectations, political attitudes, household saving and spending, time use, parenting measures, and child well-being. The results are used in collaborative efforts to provide timely policy advice and advance the understanding of social reactions to the pandemic. The project is run jointly by researchers at the University of Bonn, IZA, and other institutions.

COVID-19 Impact Lab