Norwegian And Us Policies Alleviate Business Vulnerability Due To The Covid 19 Shock Equally Well

We use Norwegian administrative data and applications for emergency government support to simulate magnitude and distribution of business revenue shock due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We rely on it to analyze the impact of business support policies available in Norway and the United States by comparing simulated results from the various policies on a common data set. We find that policies supporting payroll and fixed costs that were available in both countries have a similar impact of reducing firms' economic distress, by cutting the negative effect of the crisis on profitability, liquidity, debt, and solvency by over a half.