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  - RPRT
A1  - Caliendo, Marco
A1  - Graeber, Daniel
A1  - Kritikos, Alexander
A1  - Seebauer, Johannes
T1  - Pandemic Depression: COVID-19 and the Mental Health of the Self-Employed
T2  - CEPA Discussion Papers
N2  - 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 differences. In addition, we find larger mental health responses among self-employed women who were directly affected by government-imposed restrictions and bore an increased childcare burden due to school and daycare closures. We also find that self-employed individuals who are more resilient coped better with the crisis.
T3  - CEPA Discussion Papers - 46 
KW  - self-employment
KW  - COVID-19
KW  - mental health
KW  - gender
KW  - representative longitudinal survey data
KW  - PHQ-4 score
KW  - resilience
Y1  - 2022
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-548999
SN  - 2628-653X
IS  - 46
ER  -