To observe that the COVID-19 pandemic has (frankly, predictably) influenced recent legal scholarship is to merely observe what's in plain sight. And external shocks to doctrinal and theoretical legal scholarship invariably emerge in empirical legal scholarship as well. As efforts to study a pandemic in the middle of said pandemic invite particular complications, scholarly care, prudence, and "humility" are at a premium.
One direct legislative consequence wrought by COVID-19 is the federal Paycheck Protection Program. Anytime professional politicians rush more than a half-trillion dollars "out-the-door" to more than five million businesses problems are inevitable. Exploiting data from the Small Business Administration, in a recent paper, Funding Crises: An Empirical Study of the Paycheck Protection Program, William Birdthistle (Chi-Kent) & Joshua Silver (Chicago--Sociology), set out the initial broad contours of some of the Program's central components with particular attention to the growing number of competing claims about the Program's efficacy. Specifically, the authors test various hypotheses on whether the Program funds' distribution "suffered from politics, corruption, and waste." While certainly far from the final word, a summary of the paper's key findings follows in the excerpted abstract.
"In this Article, we conduct one of the first empirical studies of the central component of the largest financial bailout in U.S. history. We examine quantitative data released by the Small Business Administration to answer various competing claims about the effect of the PPP. Critics have accused the program of being administered as a partisan political tool for the president’s reelection, as a corrupt slush fund for cronies of the Trump administration, and as an incompetent waste of money on undeserving recipients. We test these hypotheses to evaluate the distribution of funds and whether the disbursement materially suffered from politics, corruption, or waste. We find that the lending process not only suffered from high-profile failures, it failed to target the neediest areas, particularly early on. Other studies present mixed findings on whether the PPP successfully protected paychecks. We conclude that critical data does not yet exist, as the PPP’s greatest weakness was in failing to reach businesses unable to survive long enough to apply for or to receive loans."
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