COVID-19: a crisis of the female self-employed

Daniel Graeber, Alexander Kritikos and Johannes Seebauer
Additional contact information
Johannes Seebauer: DIW Berlin

Journal of Population Economics, 2021, vol. 34, issue 4, No 2, 1187 pages

Abstract: Abstract We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed — particularly women — in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher likelihood of income losses due to COVID-19 than employees, women are about one-third more likely to experience income losses than their male counterparts. We do not find a comparable gender gap among employees. Our results further suggest that the gender gap among the self-employed is largely explained by the fact that women disproportionately work in industries that are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis of potential mechanisms reveals that women are significantly more likely to be impacted by government-imposed restrictions, e.g., the regulation of opening hours. We conclude that future policy measures intending to mitigate the consequences of such shocks should account for this considerable variation in economic hardship.

Keywords: Self-employed; COVID-19; Income; Gender; Representative real-time survey data; Decomposition methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 J16 J31 J71 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00148-021-00849-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Journal Article: COVID-19: a crisis of the female self-employed (2021)
Working Paper: COVID-19: a crisis of the female self-employed (2021)
Working Paper: COVID-19: a crisis of the female self-employed (2021)
Working Paper: Covid-19: A Crisis of the Female Self-Employed (2020)
Working Paper: COVID-19: A Crisis of the Female Self-Employed (2020)
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:spr:jopoec:v:34:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s00148-021-00849-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-021-00849-y

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().