Short‐time work (STW) is a labor‐market policy that subsidizes working‐time reductions among firms in financial difficulty to prevent lay‐offs. Many OECD countries have used this policy in the Great Recession. In this paper, we show that the effects of STW are strongly time‐dependent and non‐linear over the business cycle. Discretionary STW policy might save up to 0.87 jobs per short‐time worker in deep economic crises. In expansions, the effects are smaller and might turn negative. We disentangle discretionary STW from automatic stabilization in German data using smooth‐transition vector autoregressions.

中文翻译：

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应对危机中的失业：短期工作政策的非线性影响*

短期工作（STW）是一项劳动力市场政策，旨在补贴财务困难的公司减少工作时间，以防止裁员。许多经合组织国家在大萧条中使用了这一政策。在本文中，我们表明，STW的影响在整个业务周期中与时间密切相关且呈非线性。在严重的经济危机中，自由裁量性STW政策可能为每位短时工人最多节省0.87个工作岗位。在扩展中，效果较小，可能会变为负值。我们使用平滑过渡向量自回归将自由裁量权与德国数据的自动稳定度分离开来。