Sara Ben Yahmed (p), Francesco Berlingieri, Eduard Brüll

Francesco Scotti

Employment responses to the Covid-19 crisis differed widely across German regional labour markets with differences in short-time-work (STW) rates of up to 20 percentage points at the beginning of the pandemic. About 6 months after the start of the crisis, German regional labour markets had converged to more similar STW rates with differences of up to 3 percentage points that have persisted since then. Local endowment in information technologies (IT) reduced STW usage in the short to medium run (up to 8 months). Working-from-home potential also lowered STW rates but only in the first months of the pandemic when a strict lockdown was in place. Regional labour markets differences in unemployment rates were at most 2 percentage points and did not depend on IT capital or working-from-home potential. The flexible STW schemes in place in Germany have been successful in cushioning the negative effect of the pandemic on local employment responses, which hit regions with low IT capital harder.

Martina Soltész (p)

Sara Ben Yahmed

The 2020 COVID-outbreak has dramatically changed the banking habits. This effect of the epidemic has influenced the changes of online banking habits. The aim of the research is to get an answer to how the digital banking habits of Hungarian individuals have changed as a result of the advent of COVID-19. This quantitative analysis summarizes the online individual banking habits changes in Hungary following the COVID-outbreak in March 2020. This research presents the most significant shifts from the traditional banking custom to the online banking habits. Furthermore, this analysis breaks down the results to age groups and place of residence. Additionally, this work delivers the online banking habits trend analysis and forecast. The research was conducted in 2 periods. This work’s backbone is the presented quantitative analysis based on 400 returned surveys in the first research and 150 returned surveys in the second research. The first research was carried out until 30.10.2020 and the second research was carried out until 20.11.2021. This research covers the areas of shifting digital banking habits (the shape of mobile banking, cash payment, card payment) generation distribution and correlation between the place of residence and the use of the different banking methods. The two survey was conducted in October 2020 and in November 2021 in Hungary among private individuals.

Carolina Guevara Rosero (p)

Martina Soltész

To face the COVID-19 pandemic, governments established certain stringency measures as the lockdown and the traffic light system. However, the response to the pandemic also depends on the existent capacity and underlying conditions of regions. In this line, this study aims to determine the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and the underlying regional conditions, using two dependent variables: number of COVID-19 cases and the COVID-19 prevalence rate; for three phases: isolation, social distancing and contingency. Using daily COVID-19 data and cantonal level variables, a Negative Binomial model and a Tobit model were estimated to analyze the determinants of the number of COVID-19 cases and the prevalence rate, respectively. Our results show that the international connection and richness of cantons increased the level of COVID-19 cases but their health infrastructure reduced it. Stringency measures such as the traffic light system were effective to face the pandemic. The geographical proximity between cantons and the nature of economic activities (essential and non-essential) mattered for the spread of the pandemic.

Francesco Scotti (p), Andrea Flori, Giovanni Bonaccorsi, Fabio Pammolli

Carolina Guevara Rosero

This paper investigates the economic impact of differentiated policy restrictions against the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse the extent to which such tailored measures were able to produce stronger contraction of economic activities for higher levels of policy stringency and equal and homogeneous results for territories adopting the same level of containment measures. Exploiting a large-scale dataset encompassing daily credit card transactions mediated by a large Italian bank, we estimate panel event study models to disentangle the economic impact of low, medium and high restrictions levels in Italy during Autumn 2020. We show that differentiated policies tend to produce stronger welfare losses in terms of consumption reduction for progressively stricter regulations in specific sectors targeted by these policies. However, when we compare provinces implementing the same level of policy stringency, we show that territories with higher income per capita and larger concentration of manufacturing and service activities experience simultaneously significantly worse economic and epidemiological performances. Overall, our results suggest that policy makers should properly account for local socio-economic characteristics to produce equal and homogeneous results across territories.