We investigate the impact of the universal stimulus payments (100-350 thousand KRW per person) distributed by the largest Korean province of Gyeonggi under the COVID-19 pandemic on household consumption using large-scale credit and debit card data from the Korea Credit Bureau. As the neighboring...

We use monthly panel data on 1.3 million individuals to obtain impulse responses of consumption to debt changes. We find a stronger positive correlation between household leverage and a change in contemporaneous spending during the COVID-19 pandemic than the pre-pandemic period. Moreover, the...