Airlines + Covid 19 - The Turbulence Ahead with Kellogg Finance Professor Effraim Benmelech 

Wednesday, February 10th

Time:  5:30 pm EDT

Virtual Meeting 

**All are Welcome**
 

The global pandemic led to a crisis in the airline industry that is worse than anything we have seen before. Demand for air travel around the world collapsed in mid-March 2020, and while it slightly rebounded over the summer, domestic aircraft departures are still significantly down. International travel has been hit harder still. The CARES Act provided the largest airlines almost $16.0 billion in grants and $6.5 billion in loans to keep them afloat, but it has not been enough. In order to survive in such an environment, airlines have rushed to banks and capital markets where they issued bonds and drew on their credit lines to raise money. Join Efraim Benmelech, the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of Management, to discuss the financial condition of airlines during the Covid-19 crisis.

Efraim Benmelech is the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Finance, the Director of the Guthrie Center for Real Estate Research at the Kellogg School of Management and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Benmelech’s research interests are in the field of credit markets where he studies financial contracting, financial crises, securitization, bankruptcy and financial distress. He also writes extensively on the economics of terrorism and economic history. Professor Benmelech’s research on financial distress, the financial crisis and on terrorism have received wide media coverage in outlets such as Bloomberg, the Boston Globe,  The Economist, the Financial Times, Fortune, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA TODAY.

Benmelech received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2005.