Emergency-aid for self-employed in the Covid-19 pandemic : flash in the pan?

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CEPA discussion papers. - Potsdam : Center for Economic Policy Analysis, University of Potsdam, ISSN 2628-653X, ZDB-ID 2969685-9. - Vol. no. 55 (October 2022)

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…

10.25932/publishup-56268 [DOI]

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