TY - JOUR A1 - Bertschek, Irene A1 - Block, Joern A1 - Kritikos, Alexander A1 - Stiel, Caroline T1 - German financial state aid during Covid-19 pandemic BT - higher impact among digitalized self-employed JF - Entrepreneurship & regional development N2 - In response to strong revenue and income losses facing a large share of self-employed individuals 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 confidence to survive the crisis. We investigate how the digitalization level of self-employed individuals influences the program’s effectiveness. Employing propensity score matching, we find that the emergency-aid program had only moderately positive effects on the confidence of self-employed to survive the crisis. However, self-employed whose businesses were highly digitalized, benefitted much more from the state aid than those whose businesses were less digitalized. This only holds true for those self-employed, who started the digitalization processes already before the crisis. Taking a regional perspective, we find suggestive evidence that the quality of the regional broadband infrastructure matters in the sense that it increases the effectiveness of the emergency-aid program. Our findings show the interplay between governmental support programs, the digitalization levels of entrepreneurs, and the regional digital infrastructure. The study helps public policy to improve the impact of crisis-related policy instruments, ultimately increasing the resilience of small firms in times of crises. KW - self-employment KW - emergency-aid KW - treatment effects KW - COVID-19 KW - entrepreneurship KW - digitalization KW - resilience Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2023.2196267 SN - 0898-5626 SN - 1464-5114 VL - 36 IS - 1-2 SP - 76 EP - 97 PB - Taylor & Francis CY - London ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Block, Jörn A1 - Kritikos, Alexander A1 - Priem, Maximilian A1 - Stiel, Caroline T1 - Emergency-Aid for Self-employed in the Covid-19 Pandemic BT - A Flash in the Pan? T2 - CEPA Discussion Papers N2 - The self-employed faced strong income losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many governments introduced programs to financially support the self-employed during the pandemic, including Germany. The German Ministry for Economic Affairs announced a €50bn emergency-aid program in March 2020, offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue declines. By reassuring the self- employed that the government ‘would not let them down’ during the crisis, the program had also the important aim of motivating the self-employed to get through the crisis. We investigate whether the program affected the confidence of the self-employed to survive the crisis using real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations. We employ propensity score matching, making use of a rich set of variables that influence the subjective survival probability as main outcome measure. We observe that this program had significant effects, with the subjective survival probability of the self- employed being moderately increased. We reveal important effect heterogeneities with respect to education, industries, and speed of payment. Notably, positive effects only occur among those self-employed whose application was processed quickly. This suggests stress-induced waiting costs due to the uncertainty associated with the administrative processing and the overall pandemic situation. Our findings have policy implications for the design of support programs, while also contributing to the literature on the instruments and effects of entrepreneurship policy interventions in crisis situations. T3 - CEPA Discussion Papers - 55 KW - self-employment KW - emergency-aid KW - treatment effects KW - Covid-19 KW - entrepreneurship policy KW - subjective survival probability Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-562688 SN - 2628-653X IS - 55 CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kritikos, Alexander A1 - Schiersch, Alexander A1 - Stiel, Caroline T1 - The productivity shock in business services JF - Small business economics N2 - In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by SME, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. Similar developments can be observed in several other European economies. Using a German dataset with 700,000 firm-level observations, we analyze this largely undiscovered phenomenon in professional services, the fourth largest sector of the business economy in the EU-15, which provides important inputs to the economy and has experienced substantial growth in both output and employment since the turn of the millennium. We find that changes in the value chain explain about half of the decline and that increases in part-time employment account for another small part. Contrary to expectations, the entry of micro and small firms is not responsible for the decline, despite their lower productivity levels. Further, we cannot confirm the conjecture that weakening competition has led to an increase in the number of unproductive firms remaining in the markets and that this has led to a lower average productivity. KW - business services KW - labor productivity KW - productivity slowdown Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-022-00625-6 SN - 0921-898X SN - 1573-0913 VL - 59 IS - 3 SP - 1273 EP - 1299 PB - Springer Science + Business Media B.V. CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Kritikos, Alexander A1 - Schiersch, Alexander A1 - Stiel, Caroline T1 - The productivity puzzle in business services T2 - CEPA Discussion Papers N2 - In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000 observations between 2003 and 2017, we analyze this largely uncovered phenomenon among professional services, the 4th largest sector in the EU15 business economy, which provide important intermediate services for the rest of the economy. We show that changes in the value chain explain about half of the decline and the increase in part-time employment is a further minor part of the decline. In contrast to expectations, the entry of micro and small firms, despite their lower productivity levels, is not responsible for the decline. We also cannot confirm the conjecture that weakening competition allows unproductive firms to remain in the market. T3 - CEPA Discussion Papers - 37 KW - business services KW - labor productivity KW - productivity slowdown Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-514536 SN - 2628-653X IS - 37 ER -