This seminar will take place on July 11 at 15:30. The seminar will be in a hybrid format with:
- in-person session in the IST Alameda Campus, Department of Engineering and Management's Meeting Room
- online, via Zoom https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/92032427359?pwd=wETVGrbYHmevbV5pvio26aJvSZrdR0.1
Our seminars are free to attend and open to everyone. Please share with whomever may be interested.
Summary
We exploit the assignment mechanism of the APOIAR Program, a targeted initiative aimed at supporting the firms most affected during the COVID-19 pandemic, to provide causal evidence on the impact of grants on firm survival and performance in times of crisis. Using sharp and fuzzy regression discontinuity designs and drawing on a combination of administrative datasets, we find that eligible firms experienced a short-term increase in profitability in 2021, with €1 of support increasing net income by €0.658. However, these effects did not persist into 2022, and we found no significant changes in turnover or cost reduction, indicating that the increase in profitability was mechanically due to the subsidy. Firms allocated part of the grant to rental payments and purchases of office supplies, including modest investments in digitalization. Our findings suggest that these funds were particularly important for ex-ante less productive and more indebted firms.
Speaker's bio
João Pereira dos Santos is a researcher at Queen Mary University of London with an Horizon Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship, an Assistant Professor at ISEG – University of Lisbon (on leave), and an IZA – Institute for Labor Economics research affiliate. He is an applied economist with research interests in public, labour, urban economics, and economic history. His work has been published in outlets such as the European Economic Review, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Small Business Economics, and Journal of Economic Geography.
Personal homepage: https://sites.google.com/site/joaorpereirasantos/home