Targeted policies and household consumption dynamics: Evidence from high-frequency transaction data

Giovanni Bonaccorsi, Francesco Scotti, Francesco Pierri, Andrea Flori and Fabio Pammolli

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2024, vol. 224, issue C, 111-134

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic shock heavily affected households and prompted governments to design policies supporting household consumption. Differentiated strategies were among the most commonly adopted policies, targeting territories and economic activities with a stringency consistent with the severity of the contagion. Leveraging a unique dataset of over 1 billion household payment transactions, which captures digital and physical consumption, we provide a retrospective analysis of targeted restrictions in Italy during the fall of 2020. We show that territories implementing less stringent policies exhibit a smaller reduction in consumption and that differentiated restrictions are effective in limiting the spread of infections. Furthermore, in our analyses we account for common factors limiting household consumption choices such as disposable income, liquidity constraints and fear of contagion. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of targeted restrictions in balancing between economic and public health objectives and call for data-driven and evidence-based policymaking during crises.

Keywords: Household consumption; Policy analysis; Payment transactions; Productive sectors; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 I18 J17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268124001926
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:224:y:2024:i:c:p:111-134

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2024.05.017

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().