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

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 that 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 influence household

SUBMITTER: Georgarakos D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8876095 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature