What can 20 billion financial transactions tell us about the impacts of Covid-19 fiscal transfers?

Pongpitch Amatyakul, Panchanok Jumrustanasan and Pornchanok Tapkham

No 1130, BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements

Abstract: We investigate the impacts of fiscal transfers on households during the Covid-19 recovery period using a novel transaction-level money transfer dataset. The study focuses on direct fiscal transfers in 2021 that occurred as a result of the second major wave of Covid-19 in Thailand and analyses spending patterns for the recipients. We group the recipients by income levels and analyse patterns at the monthly and daily levels. The two main research questions are: (1) How much more spending did the groups make as a proportion of the fiscal stimulus? and (2) Did the stimulus makeup for lost spending during lock-down? We find that overall the recipients spent, on average, 40% of the money received over the first six days and 49% accumulatively over the first three months compared to a matched control group with similar characteristics. Unsurprisingly, the lower income group spent the highest proportion of the money received and the fiscal injection more than covered up for their lost spending during the lock-down period.

Keywords: impacts of fiscal transfers; Covid-19; transaction-level data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 D12 H31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay and nep-sea
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