Assessing the Heterogeneous Impact of COVID-19 on Consumption Using Bank Transactions

Selien De Schryder (selien.deschryder@ugent.be), Nikolaos Koutounidis, Koen Schoors and Johannes Weytjens (johannes.weytjens@ugent.be)
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Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: The transmission of the pandemic shock to the macroeconomy through the prism of consumer heterogeneity is the focal point of this paper. Based on a rich bank account and transactions micro dataset, we assess the roles of local COVID-19 severity, government measures against the spread of the virus, and vaccination rates for households’ consumption behavior in Belgium. We induce that households living in areas that experienced high COVID-19 positivity rates and more stringent containment measures, decreased their consumption more. The relevance of these effects, however, shifted over the course of the pandemic. Higher local vaccination rates significantly counteracted these negative impacts on household consumption. Furthermore, our study highlights that the impact of these factors on consumption varied distinctly across households with different income, liquid wealth, and age characteristics.

Keywords: COVID-19; pandemic; lockdown; consumption; income; transactions data; heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 E21 E65 G51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2024-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-hea
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:24/1090

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