EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

An Update on How Households Are Using Stimulus Checks

Olivier Armantier, Leo Goldman, Gizem Kosar and Wilbert van der Klaauw

No 20210407, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: In October, we reported evidence on how households used their first economic impact payments, which they started to receive in mid-April 2020 as part of the CARES Act, and how they expected to use a second stimulus payment. In this post, we exploit new survey data to examine how households used the second round of stimulus checks, issued starting at the end of December 2020 as part of the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act, and we investigate how they plan to use the third round authorized in March under the American Rescue Plan Act. We find remarkable stability in how stimulus checks are used over the three rounds, with a slight decline in the share dedicated to consumption and a proportional increase in the share saved. The average share of stimulus payments that households set aside for consumption—what economists call the marginal propensity to consume (MPC)—declined from 29 percent in the first round to 26 percent in the second and to 25 percent in the third.

Keywords: stimulus checks; spending (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-04-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2021 ... stimulus-checks.html Full text (text/html)

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:fip:fednls:90681

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-18
Handle: RePEc:fip:fednls:90681