The impact of Covid-19 on US firms
Nicholas Bloom,
Robert S. Fletcher and
Ethan Yeh
CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Abstract:
We use survey data on an opt-in panel of around 2,500 US small businesses to assess the impact of COVID-19. We find a significant negative sales impact that peaked in Quarter 2 of 2020, with an average loss of 29% in sales. The large negative impact masks significant heterogeneity, with over 40% of firms reporting zero or a positive impact, while almost a quarter report losses of more than 50%. These impacts also appear to be persistent, with firms reporting the largest sales drops in mid-2020 still forecasting large sales losses a year later in mid-2021. In terms of business types, we find that the smallest offline firms experienced sales drops of over 40% compared to less than 10% for the largest online firms. Finally, in terms of owners, we find female and black owners reported significantly larger drops in sales. Owners with a humanities degree also experienced far larger losses, while those with a STEM degree saw the least impact.
Keywords: Covid-19; US firms; offline firms; online firms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (44)
Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1788.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: The impact of Covid-19 on US firms (2021)
Working Paper: The impact of Covid-19 on US firms (2021)
Working Paper: The Impact of COVID-19 on US Firms (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1788
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (cep.info@lse.ac.uk).