Search Results
Showing results 1 to 5 of approximately 5.
(refine search)
Working Paper
From Transactions Data to Economic Statistics: Constructing Real-time, High-frequency, Geographic Measures of Consumer Spending
Access to timely information on consumer spending is important to economic policymakers. The Census Bureau's monthly retail trade survey is a primary source for monitoring consumer spending nationally, but it is not well suited to study localized or short-lived economic shocks. Moreover, lags in the publication of the Census estimates and subsequent, sometimes large, revisions diminish its usefulness for real-time analysis. Expanding the Census survey to include higher frequencies and subnational detail would be costly and would add substantially to respondent burden. We take an alternative ...
Discussion Paper
Discretionary Services Spending Has Finally Made It Back (to 2007)
The current economic expansion is now the third-longest expansion in U.S. history (based on National Bureau of Economic Research [NBER] dating of U.S. business cycles). Even so, average growth in this expansion—a 2.1 percent annual rate—has been extraordinarily weak. In this post, I return to previous analysis on a specific portion of consumer spending—household discretionary services expenditures—that has displayed unusual weakness in the current expansion (see this post for the definition of discretionary versus nondiscretionary services expenditures, and these posts from 2012 and ...
How Will COVID-19 Affect the Spending of Financially Distressed Households?
Consumer spending will drop substantially due to COVID-19, and the declines will hit hardest in households already in financial distress.
Discussion Paper
The Slow Recovery in Consumer Spending
One contributor to the subdued pace of economic growth in this expansion has been consumer spending. Even though consumption growth has been somewhat stronger in the past couple of quarters, it has still been weak in this expansion relative to previous expansions. This post concentrates on consumer spending on discretionary and nondiscretionary services, which has been a subject of earlier posts in this blog. (See this post for the definition of discretionary versus nondiscretionary services expenditures and this post for a subsequent update.) Discretionary expenditures have picked up ...
Journal Article
Has durable goods spending become less sensitive to interest rates?
Despite record-low interest rates, the pace of the current economic recovery has been only moderate. One reason is that the positive impact of lowered interest rates on consumer purchases of durable goods has diminished. Comparing the current economic recovery with those that followed the recessions of 1981-82, 1990-91 and 2001, Van Zandweghe and Braxton explore the way movements in key interest rates have affected consumer spending on durable goods. They find that if the boost from lowered interest rates to durable goods spending in the current recovery had stayed as strong as it was on ...