The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic placed many small businesses across the US in financial distress. In response to this, in March 2020 the US government introduced, as part of the CARES Act, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) intended to provide relief to small businesses and to preserve jobs during the pandemic. The latter resulted in three waves of funding distributed to small businesses through SBA approved lenders, mainly represented by US banks. By using a panel dataset of 4610 banks over the period Q1 2019–Q4 2020 and by employing a difference-in-differences approach (DiD), I investigate whether participation in the Paycheck Protection Program affected community banks’ credit risk-taking behaviour in the post-PPP period, compared to their non-community banking counterparts in the US. I find that the Paycheck Protection Program led community banks to decrease their risk appetite outside of the program relative to non-community banks, consistent with their greater exposure to the commercial real estate sector, heavily hit by the pandemic. My results are robust to a battery of robustness tests and identification strategies. In this research article, I offer novel evidence on the indirect impact of the Paycheck Protection Program as a government-funded stimulus program administered through banks by investigating the indirect effect of the Paycheck Protection Program on the risk-taking of US community banks that dominate lending of PPP loans as a result of their competitive advantage in soft information-intensive small business lending. Such evidence is informative to policymakers as they weigh the merits of various program options to combat the economic damage imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and as they consider the design of economic stimulus programs in response to future economic crises.

COVID-19 大流行的经济影响使美国许多小企业陷入财务困境。为此，美国政府于 2020 年 3 月推出了薪资保护计划 (PPP)，作为 CARES 法案的一部分，旨在为小企业提供救济，并在疫情期间保住就业机会。后者导致通过 SBA 批准的贷款机构（主要以美国银行为代表）向小企业提供了三波融资。通过使用 2019 年第一季度至 2020 年第四季度期间 4610 家银行的面板数据集，并采用双重差分法 (DiD)，我调查了参与薪资保护计划是否影响了社区银行的信用风险承担行为。后 PPP 时期，与美国的非社区银行同行相比。我发现，相对于非社区银行，薪资保护计划导致社区银行降低了该计划之外的风险偏好，这与它们对受疫情严重打击的商业房地产行业的更大敞口一致。我的结果对于一系列稳健性测试和识别策略来说是稳健的。在这篇研究文章中，我通过调查薪资保护计划对主导贷款的美国社区银行的风险承担的间接影响，提供了新的证据，证明薪资保护计划作为一项由银行管理的政府资助的刺激计划的间接影响PPP 贷款因其在软信息密集型小企业贷款方面的竞争优势而增加。这些证据对于政策制定者来说具有参考价值，因为他们可以权衡各种方案选择的优点，以应对 COVID-19 大流行造成的经济损失，并考虑设计经济刺激方案以应对未来的经济危机。