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

No WP-2020-12, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders during the Covid-19 pandemic to anonymized cell phone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay home: county-level measures of mobility declined 6–7% within two days of when the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: small businesses and large retail chains. Third, we estimate fairly uniform responses to stay-at-home orders across the country; effects do not vary by county-level income, political leanings, or urban/rural status.

Keywords: Covid-19; stay-at-home orders; consumer spending; high-frequency data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A19 E21 I12 R20 R50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45
Date: 2020-04-17, Revised 2021-08-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.chicagofed.org/~/media/publications/wo ... 20/wp2020-12-pdf.pdf full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior (2023)
Working Paper: Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedhwp:92745

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.21033/wp-2020-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lauren Wiese ().