TY - JOUR A1 - Schulze, Susanne A1 - Merz, Sibille A1 - Thier, Anne A1 - Tallarek, Marie A1 - König, Franziska A1 - Uhlenbrock, Greta A1 - Nübling, Matthias A1 - Lincke, Hans-Joachim A1 - Rapp, Michael A. A1 - Spallek, Jacob A1 - Holmberg, Christine T1 - Psychosocial burden in nurses working in nursing homes during the Covid-19 pandemic BT - a cross-sectional study with quantitative and qualitative data JF - BMC health services research N2 - Background The Covid-19 pandemic led to increased work-related strain and psychosocial burden in nurses worldwide, resulting in high prevalences of mental health problems. Nurses in long-term care facilities seem to be especially affected by the pandemic. Nevertheless, there are few findings indicating possible positive changes for health care workers. Therefore, we investigated which psychosocial burdens and potential positive aspects nurses working in long-term care facilities experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methods We conducted a mixed-methods study among nurses and nursing assistants working in nursing homes in Germany. The survey contained the third German version of the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ III). Using Welch's t-tests, we compared the COPSOQ results of our sample against a pre-pandemic reference group of geriatric nurses from Germany. Additionally, we conducted semi-structured interviews with geriatric nurses with a special focus on psychosocial stress, to reach a deeper understanding of their experiences on work-related changes and burdens during the pandemic. Data were analysed using thematic coding (Braun and Clarke). Results Our survey sample (n = 177) differed significantly from the pre-pandemic reference group in 14 out of 31 COPSOQ scales. Almost all of these differences indicated negative changes. Our sample scored significantly worse regarding the scales 'quantitative demands', 'hiding emotions', 'work-privacy conflicts', 'role conflicts', 'quality of leadership', 'support at work', 'recognition', 'physical demands', 'intention to leave profession', 'burnout', 'presenteeism' and 'inability to relax'. The interviews (n = 15) revealed six main themes related to nurses' psychosocial stress: 'overall working conditions', 'concern for residents', 'management of relatives', 'inability to provide terminal care', 'tensions between being infected and infecting others' and 'technicisation of care'. 'Enhanced community cohesion' (interviews), 'meaning of work' and 'quantity of social relations' (COPSOQ III) were identified as positive effects of the pandemic. Conclusions Results clearly illustrate an aggravation of geriatric nurses' situation and psychosocial burden and only few positive changes due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Pre-existing hardships seem to have further deteriorated and new stressors added to nurses' strain. The perceived erosion of care, due to an overemphasis of the technical in relation to the social and emotional dimensions of care, seems to be especially burdensome to geriatric nurses. KW - COPSOQ KW - Nurses KW - Nursing home KW - Psychosocial burden KW - Mixed-methods study KW - Covid-19 Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-022-08333-3 SN - 1472-6963 VL - 22 IS - 1 PB - BMC CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hipp, Lena A1 - Konrad, Markus T1 - Has Covid-19 increased gender inequalities in professional advancement? BT - cross-country evidence on productivity differences between male and female software developers JF - Journal of family research N2 - Objective: This article analyzed gender differences in professional advancement following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic based on data from open-source software developers in 37 countries. Background: Men and women may have been affected differently from the social distancing measures implemented to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that men and women tend to work in different jobs and that they have been unequally involved in childcare duties, school and workplace closings may have impacted men's and women's professional lives unequally. Method: We analyzed original data from the world's largest social coding community, GitHub. We first estimated a Holt-Winters forecast model to compare the predicted and the observed average weekly productivity of a random sample of male and female developers (N=177,480) during the first lockdown period in 2020. To explain the crosscountry variation in the gendered effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on software developers' productivity, we estimated two-way fixed effects models with different lockdown measures as predictors - school and workplace closures, in particular. Results: In most countries, both male and female developers were, on average, more productive than predicted, and productivity increased for both genders with increasing lockdown stringency. When examining the effects of the most relevant types of lockdown measures separately, we found that stay-at-home restrictions increased both men's and women's productivity and that workplace closures also increased the number of weekly contributions on average - but for women, only when schools were open. Conclusion: Having found gender differences in the effect of workplace closures contingent on school and daycare closures within a population that is relatively young and unlikely to have children (software developers), we conclude that the Covid-19 pandemic may indeed have contributed to increased gender inequalities in professional advancement. KW - gender KW - Covid-19 KW - inequality KW - productivity KW - international comparison; KW - GitHub Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.20377/jfr-697 SN - 2699-2337 VL - 34 IS - 1 SP - 134 EP - 160 PB - University of Bamberg Press CY - Bamberg 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 - THES A1 - Hübner, Andrea T1 - Ein multityper Verzweigungsprozess als Modell zur Untersuchung der Ausbreitung von Covid-19 T1 - Modeling the spread of Covid-19 using a multitype branching process N2 - Im Zuge der Covid-19 Pandemie werden zwei Werte täglich diskutiert: Die zuletzt gemeldete Zahl der neu Infizierten und die sogenannte Reproduktionsrate. Sie gibt wieder, wie viele weitere Menschen ein an Corona erkranktes Individuum im Durchschnitt ansteckt. Für die Schätzung dieses Wertes gibt es viele Möglichkeiten - auch das Robert Koch-Institut gibt in seinem täglichen Situationsbericht stets zwei R-Werte an: Einen 4-Tage-R-Wert und einen weniger schwankenden 7-Tage-R-Wert. Diese Arbeit soll eine weitere Möglichkeit vorstellen, einige Aspekte der Pandemie zu modellieren und die Reproduktionsrate zu schätzen. In der ersten Hälfte der Arbeit werden die mathematischen Grundlagen vorgestellt, die man für die Modellierung benötigt. Hierbei wird davon ausgegangen, dass der Leser bereits ein Basisverständnis von stochastischen Prozessen hat. Im Abschnitt Grundlagen werden Verzweigungsprozesse mit einigen Beispielen eingeführt und die Ergebnisse aus diesem Themengebiet, die für diese Arbeit wichtig sind, präsentiert. Dabei gehen wir zuerst auf einfache Verzweigungsprozesse ein und erweitern diese dann auf Verzweigungsprozesse mit mehreren Typen. Um die Notation zu erleichtern, beschränken wir uns auf zwei Typen. Das Prinzip lässt sich aber auf eine beliebige Anzahl von Typen erweitern. Vor allem soll die Wichtigkeit des Parameters λ herausgestellt werden. Dieser Wert kann als durchschnittliche Zahl von Nachfahren eines Individuums interpretiert werden und bestimmt die Dynamik des Prozesses über einen längeren Zeitraum. In der Anwendung auf die Pandemie hat der Parameter λ die gleiche Rolle wie die Reproduktionsrate R. In der zweiten Hälfte dieser Arbeit stellen wir eine Anwendung der Theorie über Multitype Verzweigungsprozesse vor. Professor Yanev und seine Mitarbeiter modellieren in ihrer Veröffentlichung Branching stochastic processes as models of Covid-19 epidemic development die Ausbreitung des Corona Virus' über einen Verzweigungsprozess mit zwei Typen. Wir werden dieses Modell diskutieren und Schätzer daraus ableiten: Ziel ist es, die Reproduktionsrate zu ermitteln. Außerdem analysieren wir die Möglichkeiten, die Dunkelziffer (die Zahl nicht gemeldeter Krankheitsfälle) zu schätzen. Wir wenden die Schätzer auf die Zahlen von Deutschland an und werten diese schließlich aus. N2 - During the Covid-19 pandemic, the discussion about the situation has been dominated by two numbers: the number of daily new infected individuals and the reproduction rate. The latter is the average number of people, one infected individual will infect with the disease. Because the number of registered infected individuals is generally not equal to the actual number of people who carry the Corona virus, many facts about the pandemic have to be estimated and can not be known for certain. Since the reproduction rate is an important parameter to signify the course of the Pandemic, many ways to estimate it have been developed. The Institute of Robert Koch in Germany uses two reproduction rates R in their daily reports: The 4-days-R-value and the less fluctuating 7-days-Rvalue. This master thesis will develop another model to estimate the R-value and other interesting aspects of the pandemic. The first part of this thesis is dedicated to the mathematical foundations needed to understand the model. The reader is expected to already have basic understanding of stochastic processes. In the section Grundlagen we will discuss branching processes and present the results of their theory that are important for our work. We start by introducing simple branching processes and expand the results to multitype branching processes. In service of a simpler notation we will only consider twotype branching processes, but the results can be used for any number of types. The importance of the parameter λ shall be stressed. It can be seen as the average number of descendants of one individual and dictates the dynamic of the process over a long period of time. Applied to the modeling of the pandemic, λ plays the same role as the reproduction rate R. In the second part of this thesis will present an application of the previously developed theory about multitype branching processes. Prof. Yanev and his colleagues modeled in their publication Branching stochastic processes as models of Covid-19 epidemic development the spreading of the Corona virus by using a branching process with two types. We will discuss this model and deduce estimators from it. We want to estimate the reproduction rate and find a way to determine the number of not registered infected individuals. The estimators will be applied to the data from Germany and we will discuss the results. KW - Covid-19 KW - Corona KW - Reproduktionsrate KW - Verzweigungsprozess KW - Modellierung KW - Covid-19 KW - corona virus KW - reproduction rate KW - branching process KW - modeling Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-509225 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bobzien, Licia A1 - Kalleitner, Fabian T1 - Attitudes towards European financial solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic BT - evidence from a net-contributor country JF - European societies N2 - Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic affects all European countries, the ways in which these countries are prepared for the health and subsequent economic crisis varies considerably. Financial solidarity within the European Union (EU) could mitigate some of these inequalities but depends upon the support of the citizens of individual member states for such policies. This paper studies attitudes of the Austrian population - a net-contributor to the European budget - towards financial solidarity using two waves of the Austrian Corona Panel Project collected in May and June 2020. We find that individuals (i) who are less likely to consider the Covid-19 pandemic as a national economic threat, (ii) who believe that Austria benefits from supporting other countries, and (iii) who prefer the crisis to be organized more centrally at EU-level show higher support for European financial solidarity. Using fixed effects models, we further show that perceiving economic threats and preferring central crisis management also explain attitude dynamics within individuals over time. We conclude that cost-benefit perceptions are important determinants for individual support of European financial solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic. KW - Covid-19 KW - financial solidarity KW - European Union KW - Austria Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1836669 SN - 1461-6696 SN - 1469-8307 VL - 23 IS - Sup. 1 SP - S791 EP - S804 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER -