To explore the impact of COVID on small businesses, we conducted a survey of more than 5,800 small businesses between March 28 and April 4, 2020. Several themes emerged. First, mass layoffs and closures had already occurred – just a few weeks into the crisis. Second, the risk of closure was...

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) aimed to quickly deliver hundreds of billions of dollars of loans to small businesses, with the loans administered via private banks. In this paper, we use firm level data to document the demand and supply of PPP funds. Using an instrumental variables...