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Public firm borrowers of the us paycheck protection program

We provide an initial assessment of the US Paycheck Protection Program by studying the 273 public firms that received a total of $929 million in loans between April 7-27, 2020. Despite receiving significant media coverage, these firms comprise 0.3% of the funds disbursed. Using guidelines specified by the US Small Business Administration, we document that about half of public firms were eligible to apply, of which 13% were eventual borrowers. Within the set of eligible firms, public firm borrowers tended to be smaller, have more employees, have fewer investment opportunities, have pre-existing debt balances, and be located in a county with Covid-19 cases. Implementing additional eligibility requirements may help target funds towards the most constrained firms.

Lead investigator:

Anna Cororaton

Affiliation:

Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University

Primary topic:

Business, big & small

Secondary topic:

Prices & interest rates

Region of data collection:

North America

Country of data collection

USA

Status of data collection

Complete

Type of data being collected:

Publicly available

Unit of real-time data collection

Firms

Start date

4/2020

End date

4/2020

Frequency

Daily

Read the results from this research