The 2020 CARES Act directed large cash payments to households. We analyze house-holds' spending responses using high-frequency transaction data from a Fintech non-profit, exploring heterogeneity by income levels, recent income declines, and liquidity as well as linked survey responses about...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of financial intermediation and the economic effects of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a large and novel small business support program that was part of the initial policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. We use loan-level...

We use a repeated large-scale survey of households in the Nielsen Homescan panel to characterize how labor markets are being affected by the covid-19 pandemic. We document several facts. First, job loss has been significantly larger than implied by new unemployment claims: we estimate 20 million...

The COVID-19 crisis and its reverberations resulted in levels of economic distress unprecedented since the 1930s. But COVID was a seismic social shock even for families that lost no income, due at least in part to abrupt school closures and the widespread threat of illness and death. The...

This paper develops a search-and-matching model that incorporates temporary unemployment and applies the model to study the labor market dynamics of the COVID-19 recession in the US. We calibrate the model using panel data from the Current Population Survey for 2001-2019, and we find that the...

The collapse of economic activity in 2020 from COVID-19 has been immense. An important question is how much of that collapse resulted from government-imposed restrictions on activity versus people voluntarily choosing to stay home to avoid infection. This paper examines the drivers of the...

The COVID-19 crisis and its reverberations resulted in levels of economic distress unprecedented since the 1930s. But COVID was a seismic social shock even for families that lost no income, due at least in part to abrupt school closures and the widespread threat of illness and death. The...