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Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior

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Abstract

We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders to anonymized cell phone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay at home: County-level measures of mobility declined 9–13% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: restaurants and retail stores. However, consumers sharply increased spending on food delivery services after orders went into effect. Third, while the response of residents to stay-at-home orders was fairly uniform across the country, there is substantial county-level heterogeneity in consumer behavior in the days before and after a stay-at-home order.

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  • Diane Alexander & Ezra Karger, 2020. "Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior," Working Paper Series WP 2020-12, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedhwp:87999
    DOI: 10.21033/wp-2020-12
    Note: REVISED May 2020
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    stay-at-home orders; high-frequency data; consumer spending; Covid-19;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • R20 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - General
    • R50 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Regional Government Analysis - - - General

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