Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior

Diane Alexander and Ezra Karger ()

No WP 2020-12, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders to anonymized cell phone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay at home: County-level measures of mobility declined 9–13% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: restaurants and retail stores. However, consumers sharply increased spending on food delivery services after orders went into effect. Third, while the response of residents to stay-at-home orders was fairly uniform across the country, there is substantial county-level heterogeneity in consumer behavior in the days before and after a stay-at-home order.

Keywords: stay-at-home orders; high-frequency data; consumer spending; Covid-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 I12 R20 R50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38
Date: 2020-05-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-ure
Note: REVISED May 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior (2023)
Working Paper: Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedhwp:87999

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DOI: 10.21033/wp-2020-12

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