Household spending and fiscal support during the COVID-19 pandemic: insights from a new consumer survey

Dimitris Georgarakos and Geoff Kenny

No 2643, Working Paper Series from European Central Bank

Abstract: This paper introduces the Consumer Expectations Survey (CES), a new online, high frequency panel survey of euro area consumers’ expectations and behaviour. The paper also investigates whether public perceptions about fiscal support measures introduced during the pandemic have influenced spending behaviour. We show that simple and factual information treatments about government support policies that are communicated to random subsets of respondents can help improve consumers’ perceptions about the adequacy of fiscal interventions relative to the perceptions of an untreated control group. We find evidence that this improvement in beliefs has a causal effect on consumer spending, in particular raising spending on large items like holidays and cars. Moreover, we show that such beliefs also influence household expectations about own income prospects, future access to credit and financial sentiment, while they do not affect expectations about future taxes, implying no evidence of Ricardian effects in household behaviour. We find that perceptions affect spending also among households that did not receive any government support, suggesting that fiscal interventions can have broader consequences as they influence the behaviour of groups beyond the targeted ones. JEL Classification: D12, E21, H31

Keywords: Consumer Expectations Survey; COVID-19; fiscal policy; household perceptions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-eec and nep-mac
Note: 483508
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2643~3c6b864dcf.en.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Household spending and fiscal support during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from a new consumer survey (2022)
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:ecb:ecbwps:20222643

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Official Publications ().