Category: Recommended Reads

Read Paper

This paper analyzes cell phone data from March through mid May, finding that private, self-regulating changes in behavior explained about 75% of the decline in foot traffic across most industries, while restrictive regulation (including school closures) had more influence on essential retail foot traffic and the fraction of cell phones that remained at home all day.

Christopher J. Cronin & William N. Evans, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 27531

Read Paper

Using data from the nation’s largest payroll processor from February through May, this paper finds that employment losses were disproportionately concentrated among low-income workers while wage cuts were disproportionately concentrated among workers in the top two deciles of the wage distribution. The percent of workers receiving wage cuts was roughly twice that
reported during the Great Recession.

Tomaz Cajner et al., National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 27159

Read Paper

This paper provides the first analysis of impacts of the pandemic on the number of active small businesses in the United States using nationally representative data from May 2020. The number of active business owners rebounded 7% since the low in April but remained 15% down from February. Drops in business activity from pre-pandemic levels are disproportionately concentrated among African-American (26%), Latino (19%), Asian (21%), and immigrant (25%) business owners.

Robert Fairlie, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 27462

Read Report

This report tracks consumer spending patterns in the weeks after receiving federal stimulus payments using debit card data for more than 16,000 recipients. Consumers who live paycheck-to-paycheck spent 68% of the funds in the first two weeks, while higher-income consumers and those who generally save a significant portion of their income spent an average of 23% in the same time period.

Ezra Karger & Aastha Rajan, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Working Paper No. 2020-15

Read Blog

The blog analyzes survey results from the U.S. Census Bureau that provide the first real-time, national data on housing payments disaggregated by race and ethnicity, income, age, and other household characteristics. Among both renters and homeowners, African-Americans, Latinos, and low-income households were more likely to miss or defer housing payments in May than other groups.

Solomon Greene & Alanna McCargo, Urban Institute