We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in U.S. history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics--but not employment dynamics--during the...

We use micro data on earnings together with the details of each state's unemployment insurance (UI) system to compute the distribution of UI benefits after the uniform $600 Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) supplement implemented by the CARES Act. We find that between April and...

In Profiles of Local Consumer Commerce, we show that the year-to-year growth of consumers' everyday spending on most goods and services in 15 major U.S. metropolitan areas has slowed dramatically, from 5 percent in the second quarter of 2014 to 0.5 percent in the comparable period in 2015. We...

Observers of the small business sector have argued that cash flow management is an important issue for small businesses and their owners, but existing data sources provide a limited empirical view of the cash flow patterns of individual small firms. We use de-identified transaction data from the...