When a family experiences a cash-flow interruption, they can adjust by spending down savings, borrowing, cutting expenditures, or generating supplementary income. With the rise of the Online Platform Economy, this last option has likely become more available. In this report, we leverage the...

For a large majority of American households, tax season brings one of the most significant positive cash flow events of the year in the form of tax refunds. Leveraging data on 1.2 million accounts receiving tax refunds in 2016, we investigate variation in the timing of tax filing across...

How do disasters affect households financially? The JPMorgan Chase Institute draws transaction-level data from over one million checking account holders to provide a first-ever daily look at the impacts of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma on financial outcomes. We find that checking account inflows...

The JPMorgan Chase Institute draws on its Healthcare Out-of-Pocket Spending Panel (HOSP) to investigate how a specific and important cash infusion—a tax refund payment—drives the timing of out-of-pocket expenditures on healthcare. We analyze average out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure on...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in three ways. First, it increased the level of benefits through a $600 and then a $300 per week supplement. Second, it expanded the pool of workers who are eligible to receive UI via the Pandemic...

Given that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a higher toll on communities of color, and previous JPMorgan Chase Institute research has demonstrated racial gaps in financial outcomes (Farrell et al. 2020), COVID-19 could result in further exacerbation of racial disparities in financial outcomes. We...

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in unprecedented economic changes that impacted families’ financial positions. In this report, the JPMorgan Chase Institute uses administrative banking data to assess checking account balances in conjunction with household income and spending. We analyze activity...

The COVID-19 recession hit the lowest-paid sectors of the economy the hardest, resulting in lower-income Americans losing their jobs and income at higher rates. Therefore, renters are more likely to have been impacted negatively by the economic shocks of the pandemic. While the Coronavirus Aid,...