Seminar: Evaluating the response to pandemic-induced business distress

Governments moved rapidly at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic to offer generous packages of relief to businesses in a bid to avoid mass bankruptcies. Was there a good case for intervening? Were interventions well-designed to achieve policymakers’ goals? How might the design of these interventions have been improved, so as to deliver relief at lower cost, or to better allocate the costs of relief? These are questions that warrant sustained scholarly investigation, with a view to holding governments to account for the decisions made in the Covid-19 emergency, and to informing analogous decision-making processes in other crises, including those with which policymakers are already having to grapple. In this seminar, Kristin van Zwieten will present some interim results from one project exploring these questions (‘‘Covid-19, public policy and commercial law’, funded by Oxford University’s Covid-19 Rapid Research Fund), including a new sole-authored paper (‘Mid-crisis restructuring law reform in the United Kingdom’) and work-in-progress on bail-outs (with Horst Eidenmueller, Oren Sussman and others) and on bail-ins (with Oren Sussman and John Vella).