One new analysis found that only about a quarter of the money spent by the program paid wages that would have otherwise been lost, partly because the government steadily loosened the rules for how businesses could use the money as the pandemic dragged on. And because many businesses remained healthy enough to survive without the program, another analysis found, the looser rules meant the Paycheck Protection Program ended up subsidizing business owners more than their workers.

“Jobs and businesses are two separate things,” said David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led a 10-member team that studied the program. “We tried to figure out, ‘Where did the money go?’ — and it turns out it didn’t primarily go to workers who would have lost jobs. It went to business owners and their shareholders and their creditors.”