Tracking the COVID-19 crisis with high-resolution transaction data

Carvalho, Vasco M.; García, Juan Ramón; Hansen, Stephen; Ortíz, Álvaro; Rodrigo, Tomasa; Mora, José V. Rodrı́guez; Ruiz, Pep

doi:10.1098/rsos.210218

Cited by 170 publications

(110 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…We estimate that Danish customers reduced spending by almost 29% relative to a counterfactual trajectory without the COVID-19 pandemic. This is enormous compared to spending drops in other contexts, e.g., it is four times larger than the typical spending drop around unemployment events (Ganong and Noel, 2019;Andersen et al, 2020b), but only around half the size of the aggregate spending drop in countries more adversely affected by the pandemic, such as France (Bounie et al, 2020) and Spain (Carvalho et al, 2020). By comparison, we estimate that Swedish customers reduced spending by around 25%.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Pandemic, Shutdown and Consumer Spending: Lessons from Scandinavian Policy Responses to COVID-19

Andersen,

Hansen,

Johannesen

et al. 2020

Preprint

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This paper uses transaction data from a large bank in Scandinavia to estimate the effect of social distancing laws on consumer spending in the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis exploits a natural experiment to disentangle the effects of the virus and the laws aiming to contain it: Denmark and Sweden were similarly exposed to the pandemic but only Denmark imposed significant restrictions on social and economic activities. We estimate that aggregate spending dropped by around 25 percent in Sweden and, as a result of the shutdown, by 4 additional percentage points in Denmark. This implies that most of the economic contraction is caused by the virus itself and occurs regardless of whether governments mandate social distancing or not. The age gradient in the estimates suggest that social distancing reinforces the virus-induced drop in spending for individuals with low health risk but attenuates it for individuals with high health risk by lowering the overall prevalence of the virus in the society.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Pandemic, Shutdown and Consumer Spending: Lessons from Scandinavian Policy Responses to COVID-19

Andersen,

Hansen,

Johannesen

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Our measurements of mobility, in fact, are not suited to capture brief short-range movements, occurring for instance within neighborhoods of the same city. Urban movements of this kind are those more related to essential sectors of the economy, which were allowed to operate in order to provide necessary services to citizens (as shown in other studies 13 , 35 , 36 ). Since we are not able to capture the higher mobility induced by essential sectors, we do not see a significant relation during lockdown.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…This is plausible since a wide share of the population relies on mobility to reach workplaces, and a significant portion of productive establishments depends on direct contact with consumers to carry on their activities. For example, mobility restrictions have been shown to be strongly correlated with consumption reduction 35 , 36 and loss of Gross Domestic Production (GDP) 37 during the pandemic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Socioeconomic differences and persistent segregation of Italian territories during COVID-19 pandemic

Bonaccorsi

Pierri

Scotti

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Lockdowns implemented to address the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted human mobility flows around the globe to an unprecedented extent and with economic consequences which are unevenly distributed across territories, firms and individuals. Here we study socioeconomic determinants of mobility disruption during both the lockdown and the recovery phases in Italy. For this purpose, we analyze a massive data set on Italian mobility from February to October 2020 and we combine it with detailed data on pre-existing local socioeconomic features of Italian administrative units. Using a set of unsupervised and supervised learning techniques, we reliably show that the least and the most affected areas persistently belong to two different clusters. Notably, the former cluster features significantly higher income per capita and lower income inequality than the latter. This distinction persists once the lockdown is lifted. The least affected areas display a swift (V-shaped) recovery in mobility patterns, while poorer, most affected areas experience a much slower (U-shaped) recovery: as of October 2020, their mobility was still significantly lower than pre-lockdown levels. These results are then detailed and confirmed with a quantile regression analysis. Our findings show that economic segregation has, thus, strengthened during the pandemic.

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“…Following this, Opportunity Insights (Chetty et al, 2020a,b) produced a dashboard using multiple data sources to track regional US consumption behavior alongside other economic indicators. 4 Beyond the US similar exercises have been carried out to understand household consumption in the early stages of the pandemic -showing remarkably consistent results (Andersen et al, 2020;Bounie et al, 2020b,a;Bourquin et al, 2020;Campos-Vazquez and Esquivel, 2020;Carvalho et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2020;Chronopoulos et al, 2020;Davenport et al, 2020b;Hodbod et al, 2020;Horvath et al, 2020;Jaravel and O'Connell, 2020;O'Connell et al, 2020;Surico et al, 2020;Watanabe et al, 2020). Analysis of JP Morgan Chase data (Cox et al, 2020;Farrell et al, 2020) has described in detail how household balance sheets have changed as a result of the COVID-19 recession and how households have responded to fiscal stimulus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Levelling Down and the COVID-19 Lockdowns: Uneven Regional Recovery in UK Consumer Spending

Gathergood¹,

Gunzinger²,

Guttman-Kenney³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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We show the recovery in consumer spending in the United Kingdom through the second half of 2020 is unevenly distributed across regions. We utilise Fable Data: a real-time source of consumption data that is a highly correlated, leading indicator of Bank of England and Office for National Statistics data. The UK's recovery is heavily weighted towards the "home counties" around outer London and the South. We observe a stark contrast between strong online spending growth while offline spending contracts. The strongest recovery in spending is seen in online spending in the "commuter belt" areas in outer London and the surrounding localities and also in areas of high second home ownership, where working from home (including working from second homes) has significantly displaced the location of spending. Year-on-year spending growth in November 2020 in localities facing the UK's new tighter "Tier 3" restrictions (mostly the midlands and northern areas) was 38.4% lower compared with areas facing the less restrictive "Tier 2" (mostly London and the South). These patterns had been further exacerbated during November 2020 when a second national lockdown was imposed. To prevent such COVID-19-driven regional inequalities from becoming persistent we propose governments introduce temporary, regionally-targeted interventions in 2021. The availability of real-time, regional data enables policymakers to efficiently decide when, where and how to implement such regional interventions and to be able to rapidly evaluate their effectiveness to consider whether to expand, modify or remove them.

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Tracking the COVID-19 crisis with high-resolution transaction data

Cited by 170 publications

References 21 publications

Pandemic, Shutdown and Consumer Spending: Lessons from Scandinavian Policy Responses to COVID-19

Pandemic, Shutdown and Consumer Spending: Lessons from Scandinavian Policy Responses to COVID-19

Socioeconomic differences and persistent segregation of Italian territories during COVID-19 pandemic

Levelling Down and the COVID-19 Lockdowns: Uneven Regional Recovery in UK Consumer Spending

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