In March 2020, the US congress passed the CARES Act. Part of this legislation included the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), whose mission was to sustain small businesses and allow them to remain open in a post-COVID economy.

In order to better assess the performance of our federal government in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, we analyzed the PPP loan distribution to assess if the loans were, in fact, targeted to those populations most heavily impacted by the pandemic. Our report informs the extent to which government intervention was being properly administered during this public health crisis. We yielded measurable objectives that federal and state legislation can strive to meet when distributing future aid relief.

Our final deliverables include:

• A comprehensive visual guide of our findings
• A detailed report
• An interactive dashboard hosted on AWS

Treasury Department

• PPP loans dataset

U.S. Census Bureau

• Census population counts
• Industry Classification Codes
• Job Counts Per Industry
• Labor Force and Unemployment Rate for California Counties
• Zip code median income
• County median income

United States Bureau of Labor Statistics

• Industry mean earnings

Opportunity Insights

• Employment-level
• Industry and Business revenue

Our team has curated a dashboard that displays the effects of the PPP loan program on California California and major industries across the state. It is available for anyone interested to view online and includes important metrics such as PPP Loan Distribution by county and small business revenue per major industry.

This dashboard is interactive so the user can choose which counties and industries they would like to explore and understand how each was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and whether the PPP loan program properly assisted businesses and industries in need. The dashboard was created using Plotly and Dash and hosted on Amazon Web Services. Here is a snapshot of our dashboard:

To access our dashboard, please follow the link provided here

1. preprocessing: contains all scripts for preprocessing our datasets
2. analyses: contains all exploratory and finalized analyses
3. dashboard: contains all files and scripts for our interactive dashboard
4. images: contains figures showcased on our readme

Ayesha Yusuf

Karina Lopez

Lila Mandela

Paul Iona