IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bdi/opques/qef_650_21.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Zombie firms and the take-up of support measures during Covid-19

Author

Listed:
  • Marco Pelosi

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Giacomo Rodano

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Enrico Sette

    (Bank of Italy)

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse the incidence of zombie firms, how they have been affected by the pandemic, and their take-up of economic support measures. While balance sheet data for 2020 are not available yet, we find that in 2019, they represented 3 to 5 per cent of all corporations. In 2020, they were more likely to experience liquidity deficits and spikes in their default probability, as well as to exit the market. Importantly, we also find that they were less likely to take up the economic support measures. Overall, as fewer firms exited the market in 2020 than in 2019, the pandemic is likely to have boosted the zombie share. However, compared with other firms, zombies have exited the market more and had a lower take-up of support measures. Thus, the Government’s policies are unlikely to have amplified such a trend.

Suggested Citation

  • Marco Pelosi & Giacomo Rodano & Enrico Sette, 2021. "Zombie firms and the take-up of support measures during Covid-19," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 650, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    • Handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_650_21
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2021-0650/QEF_650_21.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Viral V Acharya & Tim Eisert & Christian Eufinger & Christian Hirsch, 2019. "Whatever It Takes: The Real Effects of Unconventional Monetary Policy," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(9), pages 3366-3411.
    2. Giacomo Rodano & Nicolas Serrano-Velarde & Emanuele Tarantino, 2018. "Lending Standards over the Credit Cycle," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 31(8), pages 2943-2982.
    3. Ricardo J. Caballero & Takeo Hoshi & Anil K. Kashyap, 2008. "Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(5), pages 1943-1977, December.
    4. Dan Andrews & Filippos Petroulakis, 2017. "Breaking the Shackles: Zombie Firms, Weak Banks and Depressed Restructuring in Europe," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1433, OECD Publishing.
    5. Olivier De Jonghe & Hans Dewachter & Klaas Mulier & Steven Ongena & Glenn Schepens, 2020. "Some Borrowers Are More Equal than Others: Bank Funding Shocks and Credit Reallocation [A theory of systemic risk and design of prudential bank regulation]," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 24(1), pages 1-43.
    6. Giacomo Rodano & Enrico Sette, 2019. "Zombie firms in Italy: a critical assessment," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 483, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    7. Giovanni Favara & Camelia Minoiu & Ander Pérez-Orive, 2021. "U.S. Zombie Firms: How Many and How Consequential?," FEDS Notes 2021-07-30-2, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    8. Martin, Philippe & Cros, Mathieu & Epaulard, Anne, 2021. "Will Schumpeter Catch Covid-19?," CEPR Discussion Papers 15834, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    9. Müge Adalet McGowan & Dan Andrews & Valentine Millot, 2017. "Insolvency regimes, zombie firms and capital reallocation," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1399, OECD Publishing.
    10. Ryan Niladri Banerjee & Boris Hofmann, 2018. "The rise of zombie firms: causes and consequences," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Álvarez, Laura & García-Posada, Miguel & Mayordomo, Sergio, 2023. "Distressed firms, zombie firms and zombie lending: A taxonomy," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 149(C).
    2. Chakrabarti, Prasenjit & Kaur, Jasmeet, 2024. "Zombie-lending during the pandemic in India: Did the Central Bank reduce credit misallocation concerns of forbearance?," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 153-170.
    3. Francesco Columba & Tommaso Orlando & Francesco Palazzo & Fabio Parlapiano, 2022. "The features of equity capital increases by Italian corporates," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 709, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    4. Lily Davies & Mark Kattenberg & Benedikt Vogt, 2023. "Predicting Firm Exits with Machine Learning: Implications for Selection into COVID-19 Support and Productivity Growth," CPB Discussion Paper 444, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Álvarez, Laura & García-Posada, Miguel & Mayordomo, Sergio, 2023. "Distressed firms, zombie firms and zombie lending: A taxonomy," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 149(C).
    2. Maximilian Gobel & Nuno Tavares, 2022. "Zombie-Lending in the United States -- Prevalence versus Relevance," Papers 2201.10524, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2022.
    3. Christian Beer & Norbert Ernst & Walter Waschiczek, 2021. "The share of zombie firms among Austrian nonfinancial companies," Monetary Policy & the Economy, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank), issue Q2/21, pages 35-58.
    4. Chakrabarti, Prasenjit & Kaur, Jasmeet, 2024. "Zombie-lending during the pandemic in India: Did the Central Bank reduce credit misallocation concerns of forbearance?," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 153-170.
    5. Diana Bonfim & Geraldo Cerqueiro & Hans Degryse & Steven Ongena, 2023. "On-Site Inspecting Zombie Lending," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(5), pages 2547-2567, May.
    6. Kaehny, Maximilian & Herweg, Fabian, 2022. "Do Zombies Rise When Interest Rates Fall? A Relationship-Banking Model," VfS Annual Conference 2022 (Basel): Big Data in Economics 264126, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    7. Carlos Carreira & Paulino Teixeira & Ernesto Nieto-Carrillo, 2022. "Recovery and exit of zombie firms in Portugal," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 59(2), pages 491-519, August.
    8. Nirupama Kulkarni & S.K. Ritadhi & Sayan Mukherjee, 2021. "Unearthing Zombies," Working Papers 59, Ashoka University, Department of Economics.
    9. Özlem Dursun-de Neef, H. & Schandlbauer, Alexander, 2021. "COVID-19 and lending responses of European banks," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 133(C).
    10. Barbaro, Bianca & Tirelli, Patrizio, 2021. "Forbearance vs foreclosure in a general equilibrium model," Working Paper Series 2531, European Central Bank.
    11. Tuuli, Saara, 2023. "Who funds zombie firms: Banks or non-banks?," Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers 2/2023, Bank of Finland.
    12. Paolo Fegatelli, 2021. "The one trillion euro digital currency: How to issue a digital euro without threatening monetary policy transmission and financial stability?," BCL working papers 155, Central Bank of Luxembourg.
    13. Jiani Li & Jie Li & Tianhang Zhou, 2023. "State ownership and zombie firms: Evidence from China's 2008 stimulus plan," Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 31(4), pages 853-876, October.
    14. Fabian Herweg & Maximilian Kähny, 2022. "Do Zombies Rise when Interest Rates Fall? A Relationship Banking Model," CESifo Working Paper Series 9628, CESifo.
    15. Feng, Ling & Lang, Henan & Pei, Tingting, 2022. "Zombie firms and corporate savings: Evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 551-564.
    16. Hilmar, Till & Paolillo, Rocco & Sachweh, Patrick, 2022. "Contagious economic failure? Discourses around “zombie firms” in Covid-19 ridden Germany and Italy," SocArXiv wypmf, Center for Open Science.
    17. Kotone Yamada & Yukio Minoura & Jouchi Nakajima & Tomoyuki Yagi, 2023. "Corporate Finance Facility and Resource Allocation: Research Trends and Developments during the Spread of COVID-19," Bank of Japan Working Paper Series 23-E-1, Bank of Japan.
    18. Takuji Kawamoto & Taichi Matsuda & Koji Takahashi & Yoichiro Tamanyu, 2020. "Bank Risk Taking and Financial Stability: Evidence from Japan's Loan Market," Bank of Japan Working Paper Series 20-E-1, Bank of Japan.
    19. Giovanni Favara & Camelia Minoiu & Ander Pérez-Orive, 2024. "Zombie Lending to U.S. Firms," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2024-7, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    20. Ricardo Pinheiro Alves & Nuno Tavares & Gabriel Osório de Barros, 2023. "Revisitar as Empresas Zombie em Portugal (2008-2021)," GEE Papers 178, Gabinete de Estratégia e Estudos, Ministério da Economia, revised Oct 2023.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    zombie firms; Covid-19.;

    JEL classification:

    • L25 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Performance
    • E61 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Policy Objectives; Policy Designs and Consistency; Policy Coordination
    • G38 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • H32 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Firm

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_650_21. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bdigvit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.