To fight the spread of COVID-19, many countries implemented social distancing policies. This is the first paper that examines the effects of the German social distancing policies on behavior and the epidemic’s spread. Exploiting the staggered timing of COVID-19 outbreaks in extended event-study models, we find that the policies heavily reduced mobility and contagion. In comparison to a no-social-distancing benchmark, within three weeks, the policies avoided 84% of the potential COVID-19 cases (point estimate: 499.3K) and 66% of the potential fatalities (5.4K). The policies’ relative effects were smaller for individuals above 60 and in rural areas.

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. AbstractIncreasing inequality in recent decades has triggered a heated debate on whether wealth transfer taxation is an appropriate countermeasure to the perpetuation of inequality. A major factor in making progress in this discussion is understanding how taxpayers respond to incentives generated by wealth transfer taxes. Using administrative tax records from Germany, this paper investigates behavioral responses to a very large transfer tax kink in the inheritance and inter vivos gift tax schedule. We find sharp bunching of taxable inheritances and even larger bunching of taxable inter vivos gifts. However, because the kink is large, the underlying taxable inheritance and gift elasticities are moderate and amount up to 0.11. In line with the notion of accidental bequest models, further evidence suggests that the amount of wealth bequeathed is uncertain.This may explain the small size of the inheritance elasticities. Based on the results, the present paper lends strong support to the hypothesis that wealth transfers are relatively inelastic along the intensive margin in the short term.JEL codes: H21, H24, H26, H31

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