This paper uses transaction-level customer data from the largest bank in Denmark to estimate the change in consumer spending caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting shutdown of the Danish economy. We find that aggregate spending was on average 27% below the counterfactual level without...

This paper studies how shocks to the social network can have aggregate effects. First, using daily consumption data across counties over the COVID-19 pandemic and Facebook's Social Connectedness Index (SCI), we find that a 10% rise in SCI-weighted cases and deaths is associated with a 0.18% and...

Contrary to the Great and other past U.S. Recessions, the reduction in services consumption exceeds the decline in nondurables consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the drivers of this unprecedented phenomenon through the lens of an estimated multi-sector DSGE model that...