To provide economic relief following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. CARES Act granted an extra $600 per week in unemployment insurance (UI) benefit payments from late March through July 2020. This unprecedented increase in UI generosity caused weekly benefit payments to exceed...

Labor market frictions are not the only possible factor responsible for high unemployment. Credit market imperfections, driven by microeconomic frictions and impacted upon by macroeconomic factors such as monetary policy, could also be to blame. This paper shows that labor and credit market...