Short-Time Employment Aid during the Corona Lockdown: Evidence from the SHARE Countries

This project uses the new SHARE-COVID data to document the prevalence and understand the implications of short-time employment (known as Kurzarbeit in Germany) in the SHARE countries. We combine the SHARE Corona survey, which has information on individuals’ working hours during the Covid-19 lockdown, with the wave 8 data as well as the previous waves of the SHARE. We investigate who had to work shorter hours during the Covid lockdown or, on the contrary, who was forced to work longer, like people in the health industry. We first plan to report some descriptive analysis by country, gender, income and the type of industry in which people are working in. In a second step we will estimate the probability of reducing or increasing working hours by distinguishing the direct effect of the pandemic (measured  by the prevalence & severity by country/region) from the indirect effect through epidemic control decisions (measured by the prevalence, duration and stringency of the lock-down policies, e.g., the Oxford stringency index).  We will also analyze if those who reduced their working hours during the lockdown were with a previous unemployment history and if their earning loss was compensated by government subsidies.