Congress approved a third round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) on December 21. But the question remains as to what the program — which dispensed over $525 billion in funding as of August, when it first ended — has done for American businesses. Loan-level data released in December by the Small Business Administration (SBA) might hold the answer.
The record of individual loans remains incomplete, with around 55,300 loans representing almost $2.1 billion unaccounted for when compared to the totals stated in SBA summary reporting of the program. Even loans included in the dataset can be missing information, with almost 3% lacking industry identification. But the detailed data, combined with information from SBA summary reporting, allows for the fullest analysis yet of who got PPP money.
