JUE Insight: Measuring local consumption with payment cards and cell phone pings

Ben Klopack and Fernando Luco

Journal of Urban Economics, 2025, vol. 149, issue C

Abstract: We compare two widely used sources of consumption data: payment card transactions (from credit and debit cards) and cell phone location pings. We find they are positively but imperfectly correlated; payment card usage is higher among higher-income consumers, while cell phone pings only loosely track consumer spending. We develop a methodology that combines both sources to measure local retail spending and show that it closely tracks more aggregated government data. We illustrate its use by quantifying local fiscal multipliers. We show that the impacts of government spending shocks are highly localized, decay spatially, and are heterogeneous across store categories.

Keywords: Retail spending; Foot traffic; Location data; Payment cards; Fiscal multipliers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:juecon:v:149:y:2025:i:c:s0094119025000634

DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2025.103798

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