Working Papers present research work by both Danmarks Nationalbank’s employees and our partners. Working Papers are primarily targeted at professionals and people with an interest in central banking research as well as economics and finance in a broader sense.

Models

Working Paper: Dispersed consumption versus compressed output: assessing the sectoral effects of a pandemic

Daily credit-card-consumption data have been widely used to monitor the performance of various sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this data, most Danish sectors faced reduced household consumption at the onset of the pandemic, but some sectors lost much more so than others. In this report, I argue that judging the performance of sectors purely based on these responses may be misleading, since other demand sources beside households (the government and other businesses) can stabilize the collapse in household demand. In the simulations, sectors are much more similar in their output responses to COVID-19 than the household credit card data would lead to believe. (Updated version – 9 February 2021)