The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumption: Learning from High-Frequency Transaction Data

By Haiqiang Chen, Wenlan Qian, Qiang Wen. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2020

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use daily transaction data in 214 cities to study the impact of COVID-19 on consumption after China's outbreak in late January 2020. Based on difference-in-difference estimation, daily offline consumption--via bank card and mobile Quick Response code transactions--fell by 32 percent, or 18.57 million renminbi (RMB) per city, during the 12-week period. The effect is prevalent across cities and is more pronounced in the dining-and-entertainment and travel categories. We infer that China's offline consumption decreased by over 1.22 trillion RMB, or 1.2 percent of China's 2019 GDP, in the 3-month postoutbreak period.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/adec3799745c41b4738fd08fb5cb6cc2a5f39167

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Citations in the corpus

Shadow Banking in a Crisis: Evidence from Fintech During COVID-19 (2021, unknown): “…toll on the economy due to disease prevention measures including social distancing and city lockdown (see Anderson, Heesterbeek, Klinkenberg, and Hollingsworth (2020), Chen et al. (2020), Clay and Parker (2020), Cutler (2020), Eichenbaum, Rebelo, and Trabandt (2020), and Fang et al. (2020)).”
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the demand for density: Evidence from the U.S. housing market (2020, background): “Consumption amenities such as restaurants have also seen a sudden drop in the number of visits, owing to policy mandates and consumers’ concerns over the exposure to the virus in indoor public spaces (Allcott et al., 2020; Chen et al., 2020; Chetty et al., 2020; Cox et al., 2020).”
How should we understand the digital economy in Asia? Critical assessment and research agenda (2020, unknown): “For China, a 42% reduction of offline consumption has been foreseen for 2020 (year-on-year from 2019), with a smaller but still substantial 20% reduction of online consumption (Chen et al., 2020).”
Pandemic, Shutdown and Consumer Spending: Lessons from Scandinavian Policy Responses to COVID-19 (2020, background): “In contrast to Denmark, and very different to almost all other Western countries, the Swedish government opted for a lighter-touch approach to manage the outbreak, with most measures being voluntary and coming relatively late in the outbreak.(8) For example, the government first (7)In Danish, Swedis”
COVID-19 Drives Consumer Behaviour and Agro-Food Markets towards Healthier and More Sustainable Patterns (2020, methodology): “[112] have used the data relating to daily transactions from 214 cities in China to study the pandemic impact on consumption after China’s outbreak in late January 2020.”
Supply and demand shocks in the COVID-19 pandemic: an industry and occupation perspective (2020, background): “Chen et al. (2011) surveyed households following a school closure in Taiwan during the H1N1 outbreak, and found that 27 per cent reported workplace absenteeism.”
Pandemic, Mobile Payment, and Household Consumption: Micro-Evidence from China (2020, methodology): “…shortterm impact studies, irrespective of the focus on the overall changes in consumption (see Barro and Ursúa 2008; Barro, Ursúa, and Weng 2020; Chen, Qian, and Wen 2020; Correia, Luck, and Verner 2020), different category changes in consumption (see Jung et al. 2016), and dynamic changes in…”
Consumer responses to the Covid‐19 crisis: evidence from bank account transaction data (2020, unknown): “To study the role of unemployment, we run a separate regression where the unemployment indicator is added to X.(8) We present the individual-level results by displaying the estimated effect of the pandemic on the spending trajectory of individuals with a specific characteristic in one dimension (e.”