Holy days, lost days?

Eduard Brüll

No 25-056, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Do public holidays meaningfully affect economic output? In Germany, strict Sunday laws create a unique natural experiment: when public holidays fall on Sundays, they typically do not additionally disrupt business activity. Exploiting this variation across states and years, I estimate the economic cost of a "lost" workday. Using monthly manufacturing data and a stacked event-study approach, I find that weekday holidays lead to modest but measurable reductions in output. Scaling the estimates implies annual GDP losses between 0.06% and 0.28%, depending on whether the effect is assumed to apply only to manufacturing or to the whole economy.

Keywords: Public holidays; Labor supply; Natural experiment; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E23 H24 H75 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/333392/1/1942132875.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:333392

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().