Finance

Pathology

Sociology

Business

Consumer spending

Pedagogy

Recession

Disease

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Consumption (sociology)

Social science

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Macroeconomics

Transaction data

Payment

Econometrics

Psychology

Economics

Geography

Tracking (education)

Computer science

Medicine

Database transaction

Database

Royal Society Open Science

Payments systems generate vast amounts of naturally occurring transaction data rarely used for constructing official statistics. We consider billions of transactions from card data from a large bank, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, as an alternative source of information for measuring consumption. We show, via validation against official consumption measures, that transaction data complements national accounts and consumption surveys. We then analyse the impact of COVID-19 in Spain, and document: (i) strong consumption responses to business closures, but smaller effects for capacity restrictions; (ii) a steeper decline in spending in rich neighbourhoods; (iii) higher mobility for residents of lower-income neighbourhoods, correlating with increased disease incidence.

Tracking the COVID-19 crisis with high-resolution transaction data