How Do Consumers Believe the Pandemic Will Affect the Economy and Their Households?

Olivier Armantier, Leo Goldman, Gizem Kosar, Jessica Lu, Rachel Pomerantz and Wilbert van der Klaauw

No 20201016, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: In this post we analyze consumer beliefs about the duration of the economic impact of the pandemic and present new evidence on their expected spending, income, debt delinquency, and employment outcomes, conditional on different scenarios for the future path of the pandemic. We find that between June and August respondents to the New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) have grown less optimistic about the pandemic’s economic consequences ending in the near future and also about the likelihood of feeling comfortable in crowded places within the next three months. Although labor market expectations of respondents differ considerably across fairly extreme scenarios for the evolution of the COVID pandemic, the difference in other economic outcomes across scenarios appear relatively moderate on average. There is, however, substantial heterogeneity in these economic outcomes and some vulnerable groups (for example, lower income, non-white) appear considerably more exposed to the evolution of the pandemic.

Keywords: pandemic; COVID-19; spending expectations; income expectations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10-16
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2020 ... heir-households.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:88917

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 ().