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Discussion Paper
Introducing the SCE Public Policy Survey
Households cope with considerable uncertainty in forming plans and making decisions. This includes uncertainty about their personal situations as well as about their external environment. An important source of uncertainty arises from (often abrupt) changes in government policy, including changes in tax rates and in the benefit level of social programs. Tracking individuals? subjective beliefs about future policy changes is important for understanding their behavior as consumers and workers. For example, knowing the extent to which tax changes and other shifts in public policy are anticipated ...
Discussion Paper
Coronavirus Outbreak Sends Consumer Expectations Plummeting
The New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data released results today from its March 2020 Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE), which provides information on consumers' economic expectations and behavior. In particular, the survey covers respondents’ views on how income, spending, inflation, credit access, and housing and labor market conditions will evolve over time. The March survey, which was fielded between March 2 and 31, records a substantial deterioration in financial and economic expectations, including sharp declines in household income and spending growth expectations. As ...
Discussion Paper
Consumers Expect Modest Increase in Spending Growth and Continued Government Support
The New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data released results today from its August 2020 SCE Household Spending Survey and SCE Public Policy Survey. The former provides information on consumers' experiences and expectations regarding household spending, while the latter provides information on consumers' expectations regarding future changes for a wide range of fiscal and social policies and the potential impact of these changes on their households. These data have been collected every four months since December 2014 for the SCE Household Spending Survey and October 2015 for the SCE ...
Discussion Paper
An Update on How Households Are Using Stimulus Checks
In October, we reported evidence on how households used their first economic impact payments, which they started to receive in mid-April 2020 as part of the CARES Act, and how they expected to use a second stimulus payment. In this post, we exploit new survey data to examine how households used the second round of stimulus checks, issued starting at the end of December 2020 as part of the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act, and we investigate how they plan to use the third round authorized in March under the American Rescue Plan Act. We find remarkable ...
Discussion Paper
The Disproportionate Effects of COVID-19 on Households with Children
A growing body of evidence points to large negative economic and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on low-income, Black, and Hispanic Americans (see this LSE post and reports by Pew Research and Harvard). Beyond the consequences of school cancellations and lost social interactions, there exists considerable concern about the long-lasting effects of economic hardship on children. In this post, we assess the extent of the underlying economic and financial strain faced by households with children living at home, using newly collected data from the monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations ...
Discussion Paper
Inflation Expectations in Times of COVID-19
As an important driver of the inflation process, inflation expectations must be monitored closely by policymakers to ensure they remain consistent with long-term monetary policy objectives. In particular, if inflation expectations start drifting away from the central bank’s objective, they could become permanently “un-anchored” in the long run. Because the COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis unlike any other, its impact on short- and medium-term inflation has been challenging to predict. In this post, we summarize the results of our forthcoming paper that makes use of the Survey of Consumer ...
Discussion Paper
Searching for Higher Job Satisfaction
Job-to-job transitions—those job moves that occur without an intervening spell of unemployment—have been discussed in the literature as a driver of wage growth. Economists typically describe the labor market as a “job ladder” that workers climb by moving to jobs with higher pay, stronger wage growth, and better benefits. It is important, however, that these transitions not be interspersed with periods of unemployment, both because such downtime could lead to a loss in accumulated human capital and because “on-the-job search” is more effective than searching while unemployed. Yet ...
Discussion Paper
How Do Consumers Believe the Pandemic Will Affect the Economy and Their Households?
In this post we analyze consumer beliefs about the duration of the economic impact of the pandemic and present new evidence on their expected spending, income, debt delinquency, and employment outcomes, conditional on different scenarios for the future path of the pandemic. We find that between June and August respondents to the New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) have grown less optimistic about the pandemic’s economic consequences ending in the near future and also about the likelihood of feeling comfortable in crowded places within the next three months. Although labor ...
Discussion Paper
Valuing Workplace Benefits
Workplace benefits?such as parental leave, sick leave, and flexible work arrangements?are increasingly being recognized as important determinants of differences in labor supply behavior, education and occupation choice, inequality in wages, and gender disparities in labor market outcomes. Researchers have argued that the failure of the United States to keep pace in providing more generous workplace benefits accounts for 29 percent of the decline in the nation?s labor force participation rate for women relative to that of other high-income countries in the Organisation for Economic ...
Discussion Paper
Mixed Impacts of the Federal Tax Reform on Consumer Expectations
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 changed the tax brackets, tax rates, credits and deductions for individuals and similarly altered corporate tax rates, deductions and exclusions. In this post, we examine whether the reform has shifted individuals? expectations about their financial situation and the macroeconomic outlook. We also ask whether households have already started to adjust their behavior in line with their expectations. In order to answer these questions, we use novel data from a special module of the New York Fed?s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) fielded in February 2018 to ...