The credit program offsets the 2020 contraction of net credit granted outside its purview (as GDP suffers a 5.8% negative shock). In comparison, the employment program is much smaller in scale. Its size, calculated as the sum of wage bill savings from protected workers across all participating firms, reached just 0.62% of GDP by December 2020. This implies that the credit program was roughly seven times larger in terms of allocated funds.

A sizable share of firms, almost 24% (=102,648/434,411) of eligible firms, obtain guaranteed loans by December 2020 (Figure 1, Panel B).<sup>19</sup><sup>_,_20</sup> This is a large take-up compared to other Latin American countries: in Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, 14%, 16%, and 23% of eligible firms, respectively, use the credit program.<sup>21</sup> In Italy, 16% of firms use the public credit guarantee program (Core and De Marco, 2023). The employment program is also used by a significant fraction of active firms: over 15% (=69,280/449,632) by December 2020. Approximately 31% (=140,374/449,632) of active firms participate in either program, and nearly 7% (=31,554/449,632) participate in both programs. In terms of the number of firms covered, both programs are roughly similar, which implies that the large difference in allocated funds comes from the significantly higher volume of credit given to firms.

Guaranteed loans overtake overall credit during 2020. Before the credit program starts, total credit is essentially equal to non-guaranteed credit (Figure 2, Panel A). After the program begins, cumulative non-guaranteed credit declines while guaranteed credit increases significantly. Consistent with findings for the U.S. (Li et al., 2020; Chodorow-Reich et al., 2021; Greenwald et al., 2023), non-guaranteed credit to mega firms expands rapidly during the initial two months of the pandemic (Figure 2, Panel B). However, three months after the pandemic begins, the loan growth rate to mega firms decreases, and credit shifts to small and medium firms (SMEs) and large firms. This contrasts strikingly with the collapse in credit during the 1998 Asian crisis and the 2009 subprime crisis (Didier et al., 2021), when Chile’s public credit guarantee program is negligible.

As a comparison, total outstanding corporate debt increases by US$4 billion between January and December of 2020 (Figure 2, Panel C). This change can be decomposed as the sum of the change in program debt (+US$11 billion) and the change in non-program debt (-US$7 billion). The net increase in total debt of US$4 billion is significantly smaller than

> 19The 24% take-up is based on the active firms sample. The take-up is higher (36%=40,901/114,606) when considering more restrictive samples. Details about these samples can be found in Appendix Table 1.

> 20Both firms with and without credit history use the program: 61% of active firms with a guaranteed loan have a previous loan, while 39% do not. These groups receive 92.6% and 7.4% of the total guaranteed credit, respectively. Among SMEs, 8.5% of funds go to firms without loans, and 91.5% to firms with loans. Fewer qualification requirements could have increased SME participation without previous loans.

> 21This information is obtained from reports by the Central Reserve Bank and the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics of Peru, the National Guarantee Fund of Colombia, and the Government of Mexico.

9