Since the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic in March 2020, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland has been running a daily survey that asks consumers for their views on how they are responding to COVID-19 and how COVID-19 is likely to affect the economy. Among the many questions asked, the survey solicits consumers’ inflation expectations. This is an important data set given that such expectations, while affected by current and past inflation, have long been believed to influence future inflation. In this Commentary, we use these daily expectations data to propose a new measure of how attentive consumers are to inflation.

In this Economic Commentary, we focus on the first round of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans granted beginning in March 2020 until early August 2020, when turbulence in the labor market was pronounced, in order to demonstrate the PPP’s effects on local labor markets. We find that PPP loans helped mitigate the negative impact of the pandemic recession on state-level employment growth. States that received most of their funding early in the loan period had smaller employment declines than did states that received comparable funds later in the period.