JUE Insight: Measuring local consumption with payment cards and cell phone pings
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: We compare two widely used sources of consumption data: payment card transactions (from credit and debit cards) and cell phone location pings. We find they are positively but imperfectly correlated; payment card usage is higher among higher-income consumers, while cell phone pings only loosely track consumer spending. We develop a methodology that combines both sources to measure local retail spending and show that it closely tracks more aggregated government data. We illustrate its use by quantifying local fiscal multipliers. We show that the impacts of government spending shocks are highly localized, decay spatially, and are heterogeneous across store categories.
Source: Journal of Urban Economics
Authors: Ben Klopack, Fernando Luco
Institution: Texas A&M University
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $5,080
OpenAlex ID: W4413806048