We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under the COVID-19 pandemic for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a large sample of over 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government...

We use an instrumental-variables estimator reliant on variation in congressional representation to analyze the effects of federal aid to state and local governments across all four major pieces of COVID-19 response legislation. Through September 2021, we estimate that the federal government...