We study how household concerns about their future financial situation may affect the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a representative survey of UK households to compute the MPC from a hypothetical transfer of £500. We find that household expectations...

We use UK transaction-level data during the Covid-19 pandemic to study whether mortgage payment holidays (PH) can act as a mechanism for smoothing household consumption following negative aggregate shocks. Our results suggest that mortgage PH were accessed by both households with pre-existing...

We build a new dataset of listed and private nonfinancial zombie firms for a large set of Advanced Economies and Emerging Markets over the last two decades. We find that the share of these unproductive and unviable firms has been rising worldwide, especially since the GFC and the Covid-19...