Volume 241, Issue 3

In order to fight the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, monetary and fiscal policymakers announced a large variety of support packages which are often unprecedented in size. In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis of the responses of European financial markets to these policy announcements in the spring of 2020. We assemble a granular set of more than 400 policy announcements, both at the national and the European level. We also differentiate between the first announcement in a series of policies and the subsequent announcements because the initial steps were often seen as bad news about the state of the economy. In a panel model, we find that monetary policy, in particular, through asset purchases, is effective in easing the pressure on governmental finances. Stock prices are particularly sensitive to the suspension of the Stability and Growth Pact. Fiscal policy becomes more effective when monetary announcements fall on the same day. We also find sizable cross-border effects of policy announcements.

This study has two main objectives: first, it assesses the effect of outbreak pandemic diseases on the French firms’ stock returns by considering the sector of activity as the main center of analysis. Second, it investigates the role of the crisis management system, firm debt strategy, and monetary policy in dealing with the adverse shocks of the major outbreak of the COVID-19. The study results can be summarized as follows: (1) the daily growth in COVID-19 cases and deaths are associated with lower stock returns of the listed firms, especially for the firms operating in the energy, industrial and health care sectors. In contrast, telecommunication and consumer sectors are not significantly affected. (2) The pandemic’s adverse effect is much more tolerant with the French firms with an efficient crisis management system and low long-term debt commitments than the firms that do not have such a system and engaged with long term debts. (3) Euribor rates and monetary policy are still playing an essential role during the pandemic period.

We use the most recent wave of the German Qualifications and Career Survey to reveal a substantial wage premium in a Mincer regression for workers performing their job from home. The premium accounts for more than 10% and persists within narrowly defined jobs as well as after controlling for workplace characteristics. In a next step, we provide evidence on substantial regional variation in the share of jobs that can be done from home in Germany. Our analysis reveals a strong, positive relation between the share of jobs with working from home opportunities and the mean worker income in a district. Assuming that jobs with the opportunity of remote work are more crisis proof, our results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic might affect poorer regions to a greater extent. Hence, examining regional disparities is central for policy-makers in choosing economic policies to mitigate the consequences of this crisis.

Evaluating environmental questions is a crucial issue in today’s economic research and policy making. The Green-SÖP offers a comprehensive data base to enrich an empirically led scientific discourse as a survey data set on environmental and energy-related topics in Germany. The data set on more than 6000 households was collected by RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research and partners between 2012 and 2016. The questions are very diverse and range from personal attitudes to environmental policy issues with a special focus on the consequences of climate change and individual behaviors as well as opinions on ecologically related matters.