Governments around the world enacted unprecedented measures to support firms impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. This column focuses on Italy to examine the extent to which these measures ended up also benefitting non-viable but still active firms. The authors find that ‘zombie firms’ were less likely than healthy firms to access public support measures in the form of either
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Veronica Guerrieri, Guido Lorenzoni, Ludwig Straub, Iván Werning
The Covid-19 shock is unprecedented in its origin and impact. Seen through the lens of macroeconomics, the spread of the epidemic and the measures adopted to counter it have led to an unusual and simultaneous sharp fall in both supply and demand. Scholars have debated extensively the impact of this shock on firms pricing behaviour, which is difficult to predict due to its exceptional features but is of utmost importance as Covid-19 struck the US and euro area economies in the context of a persistently low inflation environment.
The debate has mainly focused on the prevalence of the demand versus supply channels, or on the ties between them (Baqaee and Farhi 2020, Bekaert et al. 2020, Brinca et al. 2020, del Rio-Chanona et al. 2020). A theory of Keynesian supply shocks has emerged (Guerrieri et al., 2020) where temporary supply shortages that asymmetrically affect different sectors of the economy trigger a contracti