The threat of COVID-19 has increased the health risks of going to an office or factory, leading more workers to do their jobs remotely. In this paper, we provide results from firm surveys on both small and large businesses on the prevalence and productivity of remote work, and expectations about...

In addition to its impact on public health, COVID-19 has had a major impact on the economy. To shed light on how COVID-19 is affecting small businesses – and on the likely impact of the recent stimulus bill, we conducted a survey of more than 5,800 small businesses. Several main themes emerge...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, states issued and then rescinded stay-at-home orders that restricted mobility. We develop a model of learning by deregulation, which predicts that lifting stay-at-home orders can signal that going out has become safer. Using restaurant activity data, we find that...

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...

How effective are restrictions on mobility in limiting COVID-19 spread? Using zip code data across five U.S. cities, we estimate that total cases per capita decrease by 20% for every ten percentage point fall in mobility. Addressing endogeneity concerns, we instrument for travel by residential...

How quickly will American businesses reopen after COVID-19 lockdowns end? We use a nationwide survey of small businesses to measure firms' expectations about their re-opening and future demand. A plurality of firms in our sample expect to reopen within days of the end of legal restrictions, but...