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Glenn Hubbard

Official · White House

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Official · White House
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

A former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers who, with Michael R. Strain, published one of the first econometric evaluations of the Paycheck Protection Program in fall 2020 and concluded it had "substantially increased the employment, financial health, and survival of small businesses."

Identity and role

R. Glenn Hubbard is an economist, a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, Dean Emeritus of Columbia Business School and the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia. He is also a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Pandemic-relief / PPP-EIDL role

In 2020 Hubbard and Strain of the American Enterprise Institute wrote a proposal for business relief, A Business Fiscal Response to a COVID-19 Recession, which their later paper cites. Their evaluation, "Has the Paycheck Protection Program Succeeded?," appeared in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity in fall 2020, using Dun & Bradstreet data on small businesses.

The paper calls PPP "the most ambitious and creative fiscal policy response to the pandemic recession in the United States" and describes its forgivable loans as "essentially grants." Its authors report that applying for a larger loan and being eligible by size both raised employment, financial health and business continuity, with larger effects in August than in April or May, and that "it may have taken a month or two for PPP to kick in." In their intent-to-treat model, eligibility cut the odds of a business closing by 0.22 percentage points. The paper also says it is "too early to issue conclusive judgment on PPP's success."

In the published discussion, commentators wrote that their own business-continuity-insurance proposal had been inspired in part by Hubbard and Strain's earlier writing on the program.

Their own relief

No PPP or EIDL loan to Hubbard personally is established in the public record.

No criminal charge, civil enforcement action or settlement involving Hubbard appears in the public record.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Resources for the Future and AEI biographies identify Hubbard as Dean Emeritus and a Columbia professor, and as a senior or nonresident fellow working on economic policy.

Sources

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