After the Storm: How Emergency Liquidity Helps Businesses Following Natural Disasters
Severe climate events create financial distress for businesses. Can emergency credit help? We study the causal effects of government-provided business recovery loans. Our data include loan applications from over 167,000 firms representing 1,900 distinct disasters, which we merge with census records and business credit reports. We follow firms for seven years after experiencing a disaster across a rich set of real and financial outcomes. We find that recovery loans help firms survive, reducing exit and bankruptcy. They also increase employment. Our results suggest that in the disruptive aftermath of a natural disaster, businesses that need funds to recover often struggle to access credit from private lenders. Recovery loans crowd in private credit, which may reflect resolving private-lender uncertainty about repair feasibility.
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Copy CitationBenjamin L. Collier, Sabrina T. Howell, and Lea Rendell, "After the Storm: How Emergency Liquidity Helps Businesses Following Natural Disasters," NBER Working Paper 32326 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3386/w32326.Download Citation
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