The unemployment impact of the COVID-19 shutdown measures in Germany

This paper evaluates the short-term labour market impact of the COVID-19 Containment measures in Germany. We take the closure of economic sectors such as restaurants and retail as a treatment, which enables difference-in-difference estimation. Additionally considering input-output linkages between the sectors, we find that 60 percent of the considerably increased inflows from employment into unemployment in April 2020 were due to the containment measures. In a second approach, we make use of the fact that sector closures and curfews were implemented at different times by the German state governments. In a regional regression setup based on treatment intensity, we find that the hiring margin accounted for additional 82 percent of the unemployment effect coming from the separations margin. In sum, the lockdown measures increased unemployment in the short run by 117,000 persons.