The impact of COVID-19 on households´ income in the EU.

Unlabelled: This analysis makes use of economic forecasts for 2020 issued by the European Commission in Autumn 2019 and Spring 2020, and of a counterfactual under a no-policy change assumption, to analyse the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on EU households´ income. Additionally, our analysis assesses the cushioning effect of discretionary fiscal policy measures taken by the EU Member States. We find that the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to affect significantly households' disposable income in the EU, with lower income households being more severely hit.

Economic sentiment during the COVID pandemic: Evidence from search behaviour in the EU.

The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted an economic hardship unprecedented for the modern age. In this paper, we show that the health crisis and ensuing lockdown, came with an unseen shift in households' economic sentiment. First, using a European dataset of country-level and regional internet searches, we document a substantial increase in people's business cycle related searches in the months following the coronavirus outbreak.