Data in the Time of COVID-19

Household-level financial data will hold valuable clues to aid financial recovery.

New research from Columbia Business School shows significant changes in household spending patterns since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is touted as the “first real-time view into household consumption” since the outbreak began. 

Their primary data source? SaverLife members’ household-level financial transactions. 

Access to transactional data means we can measure the economic impact of the crisis and the effectiveness of interventions in real-time - with data that refreshes daily - avoiding an information lag that we cannot afford during a rapidly changing crisis.

This matters. Understanding household patterns in income, spending, saving and debt is an invaluable tool in tracking the disparate economic impacts of the crisis and what will almost certainly be an uneven recovery. Measuring the effectiveness of stimulus payments, unemployment insurance, and philanthropic interventions like direct cash relief will allow us to identify who is coping, who is recovering and who is struggling, and target our response. Simply put, better data means better solutions.

SaverLife is putting our data to work. We use transactional data to power our income volatility tracker which detects sudden drops in income, allowing us to direct cash relief to those who need it most. When we see a stimulus payment hit an account we reach out to encourage setting aside a portion for emergency savings. We will continue to follow the signposts in our data to launch effective solutions that boost financial resilience as the crisis and recovery continues to unfold.

We are posting updates weekly on our COVID-19 data site, building live dashboards and launching interactive forums and polls to directly engage our clients. We hope researchers, foundations, nonprofits and policymakers can use this information to make well-informed and effective decisions that help those most in need.  We invite all of you to engage with our data and send us your questions or ideas about what you would like to better understand. If we can help, we will.

In the meantime, here are a few key findings from the Columbia Business School paper, which was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and intended to be the first of several deep dives into SaverLife members’ data:

• Spending increased by approximately 50% between February 26 and March 11. Households also increased card spending as they borrowed to stockpile goods.

• Grocery spending remained elevated through March 27, with a 7.5% increase relative to earlier in the year. Households with children stockpiled more, and men stockpiled less in early days as the virus was spreading.

• The overall drop in spending is approximately twice as large in states that issued shelter- in-place orders like New York, California and Washington State, and the increase in grocery spending is three times as large in these states.

These insights are fascinating, but what matters is what we do with them. Insights, then action.