Early indicators suggest that startup activity across countries is heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns. At the same time, empirical evidence has shown that such disturbances may have long-lasting effects on aggregate employment. This paper presents a calculator which can be used to compute these effects under different scenarios regarding (i) the number of startups, (ii) the growth potential of startups, and (iii) the survival rate of young firms. We apply our calculator to the U.S. and four European countries: France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We find that employment losses can be substantial and last for more than a decade, even when the assumed slump in startup activity is only short-lived. Almost half of the long-run losses is caused by fewer high-growth firms, “gazelles”, starting up during the pandemic. Our results also suggest that the long-run effects of the pandemic may vary across countries substantially with Germany possibly being shielded due to its low business dynamism.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 大流行后的创业和就业：计算器

早期指标表明，各国的创业活动受到 COVID-19 大流行和相关封锁的严重影响。同时，经验证据表明，这种干扰可能对总就业产生长期影响。本文提出了一个计算器，可用于计算不同情景下的这些影响，包括 (i) 初创公司的数量，(ii) 初创公司的增长潜力，以及 (iii) 年轻公司的存活率。我们将我们的计算器应用于美国和四个欧洲国家：法国、德国、意大利和西班牙。我们发现，即使假设的创业活动下滑只是短暂的，就业损失也可能是巨大的并且持续十多年。几乎一半的长期损失是由于在大流行期间启动的高增长公司“瞪羚”减少造成的。