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  -