We use daily survey data from Gallup to assess whether households' beliefs about economic conditions are influenced by surprises in monetary policy announcements. We first provide more general evidence that public confidence in the state of the economy reacts to certain types of macroeconomic...

Stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) have been implemented in most U.S. states to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This paper quantifies the short-run impact of these containment policies on the supply of and demand for child care. The child care market may be particularly vulnerable to a SAHO-type...

This paper studies how shocks to the social network can have aggregate effects. First, using daily consumption data across counties over the COVID-19 pandemic and Facebook's Social Connectedness Index (SCI), we find that a 10% rise in SCI-weighted cases and deaths is associated with a 0.18% and...

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...

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...

This paper takes an early look at 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. We use new data on the distribution of the first round of PPP loans and high-frequency micro-level...

The COVID-19 pandemic represents the largest world-wide shock in at least a decade. Moreover, the spread of the virus has been highly heterogeneous. This paper investigates the role of social capital as a potential mediating factor for the spread of the COVID-19 virus. On one hand, higher social...

In this brief, we provide a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the impact of current mitigation measures on the 2020 GDP growth rate. That impact varies by industry, and we are able to identify this variation by adopting a simple but plausible assumption: industries will remain in business in...

This paper provides an early estimate of the economic effects of the national quarantine policy associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Using a measure of digital intensity from Gallipoli and Makridis (2018), we exploit counties' exposure to industries that vary in their...