Administrative data on German short-time work: essentials and potentials

The German short-time work (STW) scheme, known as Kurzarbeit , is a subsidy that preserves matches between workers and firms during periods of economic distress. Firms do not have to pay workers for hours not worked, while the state partially replaces employees’ lost earnings. Krugman ( 2009 ), for example, credits Kurzarbeit with helping Germany’s labor market recover from the Great Recession much more quickly than the US. Conspicuously absent from the ensuing debate about this argument (e.g., Burda and Hunt 2011 ), however, were analyses based on rich administrative data. Some information was available from aggregate statistics, establishment surveys and an attempt to collect STW data for the district of Nuremberg (used, e.g., in Tilly and Niedermayer 2017 ), but it was insufficient to conduct a comprehensive, in-depth investigation of Kurzarbeit . This data gap has now been closed. As STW usage during the Covid-19 pandemic far exceeded its use during the Great Recession, efforts were made to make administrative micro data on Kurzarbeit available for research.