Already, companies large and small are succumbing to the effects of the coronavirus. They include household names like Hertz and J. Crew and comparatively anonymous energy companies like Diamond Offshore Drilling and Whiting Petroleum.

And the wave of bankruptcies is going to get bigger.

Edward I. Altman, the creator of the Z score, a widely used method of predicting business failures, estimated that this year will easily set a record for so-called mega bankruptcies — filings by companies with $1 billion or more in debt. And he expects the number of merely large bankruptcies — at least $100 million — to challenge the record set the year after the 2008 economic crisis.

Even a meaningful rebound in economic activity over the coming months won’t stop it, said Mr. Altman, the Max L. Heine professor of finance, emeritus, at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “The really hurting companies are too far gone to be saved,” he said.

Many are teetering on the edge. Chesapeake Energy, once the second-largest natural gas company in the country, is wrestling with about $9 billion in debt. Tailored Brands — the parent of Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank and K&G — recently disclosed that it, too, might have to file for bankruptcy protection. So did Weatherford International, an oil field services company that emerged from bankruptcy only in December.

More than 6,800 companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year, and this year will almost certainly have more. The flood of petitions from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression could swamp the system, making it harder to save the companies that can be rescued, bankruptcy experts said.

Most good-size companies that go into bankruptcy try to restructure themselves, working out payment agreements for their debts so they can stay open. But if a plan can’t be worked out — or isn’t successful — they can be liquidated instead. Equipment and property are sold off to pay debts, and the company disappears.

Without reform in the system, “we anticipate that a significant fraction of viable small businesses will be forced to liquidate, causing high and irreversible economic losses,” a group of academics said in a letter to Congress in May. “Workers will lose jobs even in otherwise viable businesses.”

Among their suggestions: increasing budgets to recall retired judges and hire more clerks, and giving companies more time to come up with workable plans to prevent them from being sold off for parts.

“Tight deadlines may lead to overly optimistic restructuring plans and subsequent refilings that will congest courts and delay future recoveries,” they wrote.

The pandemic — with its lockdowns, which have just started to ease — was enough on its own to put some businesses under. The gym chain 24 Hour Fitness, for example, declared bankruptcy this week, saying it would close 100 locations because of financial problems that its chief executive attributed entirely to the coronavirus.

But in many cases, the coronavirus crisis exposed deeper problems, like staggering debts run up by companies whose business models were already struggling to deal with changes in consumer behavior.

Hertz has been weighed down by debt created in a leveraged buyout more than a decade ago, and added to it with the acquisition of Dollar Thrifty in 2012. As it was battling direct competitors, the ascent of Uber and Lyft further upended the rental-car industry.

J. Crew and Neiman Marcus were carrying heavy debt loads from leveraged buyouts by private equity firms while struggling to deal with the changing preferences of shoppers who increasingly buy online.

Oil and gas companies like Diamond and Whiting borrowed heavily to expand when commodities prices were much higher. Those prices started to fall as production increased, and plunged further still when Russia and Saudi Arabia got into a price war shortly before the economic shutdowns began.

(And then there are cases that have nothing to do with the pandemic but nonetheless take up time and energy in the courts. Borden Dairy, a Dallas company with a history that goes back to 1857, declared bankruptcy in January, a victim of declining prices, rising costs and changing tastes.)

A run of defaults looks almost inevitable. At the end of the first quarter of this year, U.S. companies had amassed nearly $10.5 trillion in debt — by far the most since the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis began tracking the figure at the end of World War II.

“An explosion in corporate debt,” Mr. Altman said.

Having a lot more debt to deal with is likely to make the coming bankruptcies a bruising experience for unsecured creditors, who may include retirees with pensions or health benefits, vendors waiting to be paid, tort plaintiffs whose lawsuits are cut short and sometimes even current workers. If a company goes into bankruptcy with more secured debts than the value of its assets, the secured creditors — including vulture investors who bought up the debt for a song — can walk away with virtually everything.

The sums at play in some of these cases will be enormous. Mr. Altman expects at least 66 cases with more than $1 billion in debt this year, eclipsing 2009’s mark of 49. He also predicted 192 bankruptcies involving at least $100 million in debt, which would trail only 2009’s record of 242.

Robert J. Keach, a director of the American College of Bankruptcy, said many companies had so far managed to put off bankruptcy by amassing cash and conserving it as best they can: drawing down existing credit lines, furloughing workers, delaying projects and taking advantage of federal and state pandemic-relief programs.

But when those programs expire, the companies will start burning through their cash. That’s when bankruptcy filings are likely to soar and stay elevated, Mr. Keach said.

Expect “a Covid-19 cliff” in the next 30 to 60 days, he said.

Companies that received loans under the federal Paycheck Protection Program may be waiting to file, said Mr. Keach, who practices bankruptcy law with the firm of Bernstein Shur in Portland, Maine. The loans can be converted to grants if the companies meet certain requirements, and if the borrowers can put off bankruptcy until they’re sure they won’t have to pay the money back, they will have more cash when they file.

That’s an important consideration, because Chapter 11 is expensive. A bankrupt company must pay the fees of the lawyers and other professionals that help it reorganize, as well as the fees of those who advise the official creditors’ committees.

The experts’ recommendations to Congress walk a fine line. They suggest allowing companies more time to come up with reorganization plans, even though Chapter 11 cases are supposed to move quickly so bankrupt companies don’t burn through their cash before they reorganize.

Generally, the longer a company stays in bankruptcy, the greater the chances of a liquidation. And that increases the likelihood that the company’s troubles will spread: Suppliers of raw materials could fold if a manufacturer languishes in bankruptcy, and smaller stores in entirely differently lines of business can suffer if a shopping-mall anchor can’t stay open.

These risks are real, said Robert E. Gerber, who retired in 2016 as a bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of New York. One of his cases was the 2009 bankruptcy of General Motors, which moved at lightning speed to keep the automaker from going under for good.

“If G.M. had failed, God knows how many companies in the supply chain would have failed, and this would have snowballed terribly,” said Mr. Gerber, who is now of counsel with the Joseph Hage Aaronson firm. The cascade would have wiped out paychecks to workers throughout the supply chain, threatening other businesses and even the finances of the local governments that count on them for tax revenue.

That, Mr. Gerber said, makes it imperative that the bankruptcy system have the resources to deal with the coming rush of cases.

“Bankruptcy can’t print money for those companies,” he said, “but it can give a good number of them a chance of survival.”

Two new studies show that giving pay raises to low-wage workers is good for consumers, too.

That finding could add momentum to efforts to help grocery store clerks, nursing home workers and delivery drivers who are being paid a minimum wage despite their efforts being so essential during the current pandemic.

The new research shows that raising the minimum wage improves workers’ productivity, which translates into businesses offering higher-quality service.

Because many customers are willing to pay more when quality improves, a company can raise its prices without losing sales volume. That means that profits need not suffer even though employee salaries increase.

Moreover, because companies are getting better performance from workers in return for paying them more, a higher minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs. With a more productive work force, more economic value is being created and there is more money to go around, so a higher paycheck for one person does not imply another person’s loss.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not increased since 2009, though Democrats in the House of Representatives have tried to raise it. State and local governments can set their own minimum wage, provided that it is above the federal rate. For example, Ohio’s minimum wage is $8.70 an hour and New York state’s is $11.80. San Francisco’s is $15.59 an hour.

The two new studies, one focused on nursing homes and the other on department stores, looked at the effects of minimum wage changes made at various levels of government. While they are both still working papers and have not appeared in scholarly journals, they were conducted rigorously, by my estimation, and the evidence they offer deserves consideration in the debate on the minimum wage, particularly during our current health and economic crises.

The nursing home study, by the economist Krista Ruffini, a visiting scholar at the Minnesota Federal Reserve, has direct implications in the current pandemic. The improvements in quality it found may be a very a big deal: They imply fewer medical complications and, perhaps, a longer life for patients.

Ms. Ruffini analyzed hundreds of increases in the minimum wage across the United States from 1990 to 2017. In each case, she compared employment in neighboring counties that suddenly had different minimum wage levels.

Her method expands on a landmark study by David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Alan Krueger, the former presidential adviser and Princeton economist, who found no drop in fast-food employment when New Jersey raised its minimum wage in 1992 above the level paid across the state line in Pennsylvania.

Similarly, Ms. Ruffini found little change in employment levels in nursing homes. Many employees were paid the minimum wage or somewhat more than that. Even in cases of the workers — nursing assistants — who had been paid more than the minimum wage, an increase in that base wage rippled through the labor market and still raised their salaries.

Ms. Ruffini’s most startling finding was that higher minimum wages reduced mortality significantly among nursing home residents. Her research suggests that if every county increased its minimum wage by 10 percent, there could be 15,000 fewer deaths in nursing homes each year, or about a 3 percent reduction.

How did pay increases translate into better patient health and longer lives? It appears that with better pay, jobs in nursing homes became more attractive, so employee turnover decreased. Patients benefited from more continuity in their care.

In addition, the better paid employees may have simply worked harder, perhaps because they cared more about holding onto their jobs. Economists say they have been paid an “efficiency wage”: Employees become more productive when their wages are higher.

The higher wage may also have attracted more skilled or industrious people to the job, but this seems to account for at most a small portion of the improvements in patient health.

A crucial finding is that the benefits for workers and patients did not come with any apparent downside to nursing homeowners. Their profits remained steady because they were able to defray their increased costs by charging higher fees. That’s one reason these results might not apply in all industries. There are few alternatives to using a nursing home, so if the industry raises prices, it will not lose too many customers.

But, equally important, patients were not charged more for the same service: Quality improved in measurable ways as wages rose.

What unlocked these gains was government action: All nursing homes in a community had to pay employees more. That eliminated competitive disparities that might have made individual operators reluctant to raise wages unilaterally.

Similar effects turned up in a second study, this one focused on department stores. It found that a higher minimum wage increased employee performance, with no significant change in store profits. A team of economists — Decio Coviello at the University of Montreal and my colleagues, Erika Deserranno and Nicola Persico at Northwestern University — used data for 2012 to 2015 from a department store chain that operated 2,000 stores across the United States. They did not disclose the name of the chain. The researchers measured job performance directly by calculating sales revenue per hour.

Each week, an employee was paid either a commission, if her sales were good, or the local minimum wage. Most workers were paid the minimum wage at least some of the time. When the minimum wage increased, their job performance improved.

The study has an important implication during a crisis like this one: When the labor market was weakest, a higher minimum wage led to the biggest improvements in job performance. A period of economic distress is precisely when workers really want to hold onto their jobs, so the “efficiency wage” effect is large.

Supporters of raising the minimum wage usually make their case based on fairness and equity. That rationale is important, but the central finding of these studies — that a higher minimum wage can boost work force productivity and save lives — is a powerful one, too.

Seema Jayachandran is an economics professor at Northwestern University. Follow her on Twitter: @seema_econ