Pandemic Effects: Do Innovation Activities of Firms Suffer from Long-COVID? KU Leuven
The COVID-19 pandemic exogenously hit many economies early 2020. Exploiting treatment heterogeneity, we use a conditional difference-in-differences design to causally identify how COVID-19 impacted firms’ innovation spending in the short and medium term. Based on a representative sample of German firms, we find that firms that were strongly negatively treated by COVID-19 substantially reduced innovation spending not only in the first year of the ...