 Assessing the heterogeneous impact of COVID-19 on consumption using bank transactionsSelien De Schryder, Nikolaos Koutounidis, Koen Schoors and Johannes Weytjens Journal of Macroeconomics, 2025, vol. 84, issue C 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 find 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; Transactions data; Heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jmacro:v:84:y:2025:i:c:s016407042500014x DOI: 10.1016/j.jmacro.2025.103677 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Macroeconomics is currently edited by Douglas McMillin and Theodore Palivos More articles in Journal of Macroeconomics from Elsevier |
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