Measuring Consumption with Credit Card Data: Benchmarking and Beyond (with Aditya Aladangady and Ricardo Duque Gabriel) (draft coming soon)
We introduce a novel monthly county-level consumption dataset constructed from spending data on over 350 million credit cards in the Federal Reserve’s Y-14M reports, covering more than 3,000 U.S. counties since 2014. We first show that the data closely approximate traditional consumption measures, explaining 92 percent of the variation in monthly adjusted personal consumption expenditures (PCE) growth at the national level and 88 percent at the annual state level. We then exploit the high frequency and geographic granularity of the data to estimate heterogeneous consumption responses to monetary policy shocks across the county-level income distribution, an analysis infeasible with traditional data sources. We find that low-income counties exhibit substantially larger spending declines than high-income counties, consistent with predictions of heterogeneous agent New Keynesian models.
Scheduled At: 2026 NBER SI Conference on Research in Income and Wealth; Spring 2027 CRIW Conference on Disaggregated Regional Accounts
Presented At: 2026 FDIC Consumer Finance Round Robin
Who Pays For Your Rewards? Redistribution in the Credit Card Market (with Sumit Agarwal, Andrea F. Presbitero, and Andre F. Silva) (under review)
We study credit card rewards to quantify consumer redistribution in retail financial markets. Using account-level data on over 200 million U.S. credit cards, we find that reward cards benefit high-FICO consumers at the expense of low-FICO consumers. FICO scores determine the direction of the transfer, while income scales its magnitude. Reward cards induce higher spending across all consumer types, but only low-FICO consumers accumulate higher unpaid balances. Bank profits on reward cards are positive for low-FICO consumers but negative for super-prime cardholders, consistent with a cross-subsidization mechanism in which profits from naïve revolvers fund the rewards extracted by sophisticated transactors.
Media Coverage: Economist, CNBC (video), Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg (1), Bloomberg (2), FT Alphaville, Wall Street Journal, Vox, Barrons, Motley Fool, View from the Wing, Marginal Revolution
Published As: FEDS Working Paper 2023-007, CEPR Discussion Paper 17733, IMF Working Paper 2023/054
Presented At: 2026 NBER SI Household Finance; WFA 2023 (San Francisco); SFS Cavalcade North America 2023 (Austin); 2025 EFA (Paris); FIRS 2022 (Budapest); 2023 Swiss Winter Conference on Financial Intermediation 2023 (Gerzensee); 2022 UBC Winter Finance (Whistler); EEA 2022 (Milan); 2022 CEAR-RSI Household Finance Workshop (Montreal); 2025 Annual Conference Banco Central do Brasil (Brasilia); 2024 Economics of Payments XIII (Vienna); 2024 Georgia Tech – Atlanta Fed Household Finance Conference (Atlanta); IEA World Congress 2023 (Medellin); Federal Reserve/George Washington University Financial Literacy Seminar (Virtual); 2022 SFA (Key West); Fourth Workshop on Payments, Lending, and Innovations in Consumer Finance (Philadelphia); Research in Behavioral Finance Conference 2022 (Amsterdam); 2022 IWFSAS (London); Behavioural Finance Working Group 15th Annual Conference (London); 5th Bristol Banking Workshop (Bristol)
I study the long-run effects of credit market disruptions on real firm outcomes and how these effects depend on nominal wage rigidity at the firm level. Exploiting variation in firms' refinancing needs during the global financial crisis, I trace out firms' investment and growth trajectories in response to a credit supply shock. Financially shocked firms exhibit a temporary investment gap for two years, resulting in a persistent accumulated growth gap six years after the crisis. Shocked firms with rigid wages exhibit a significantly steeper drop in investment and an additional long-run growth gap relative to shocked firms with flexible wages.
Published as: FEDS Working Paper 2023-019
Presented at: EEA 2023 (Barcelona), SEA 89th Annual Meetings, Federal Reserve Board, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Bank of Canada, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Bank of Finland, Danmarks Nationalbank, Bank of England, Lancaster University, University of Zurich, Halle Institute of Economic Research, Goethe University Frankfurt, 25th Finance Forum Barcelona
(4) Supranational Rules, National Discretion: Increasing versus Inflating Regulatory Bank Capital?. 2024. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 59 (2), 830 - 862. (with Reint Gropp, Thomas Mosk, Steven Ongena, and Ines Simac)
(3) The COVID-19 Shock and Consumer Credit: Evidence from Credit Card Data. 2023. Journal of Banking and Finance 152, 106854 (with Akos Horvath and Benjamin Kay)
(2) COVID-19 as a Stress Test: Assessing the Bank Regulatory Framework. 2022. Journal of Financial Stability 61, August 2022, 101016. (with Elizabeth Duncan, Akos Horvath, Diana Iercosan, Bert Loudis, Alice Maddrey, Francis Martinez, Timothy Mooney, Ben Ranish, Ke Wang, and Missaka Warusawitharana)
(1) Banks Response to Higher Capital Requirements: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment. 2019. Review of Financial Studies 32 (1), 266–299. (with Reint Gropp, Thomas Mosk, and Steven Ongena)
The April 2026 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices. 2026. Federal Reserve Board.
Estimated Quarterly Levels of Bank Lending Standards and Credit Availability, 2025, FEDS Notes. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, June 06, 2025 (with Jaron Berman and Felicia Ionescu)
The July 2024 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices. 2024. Federal Reserve Board.
The October 2023 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices. 2023. Federal Reserve Board.
Open Board Meeting Memo July 27 on Basel III endgame. 2023. Federal Reserve Board.
Buffer usability and cyclicality in the Basel framework. 2022. Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.
The July 2022 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices. 2022. Federal Reserve Board.
Analyzing the Community Bank Leverage Ratio, 2020, FEDS Notes. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, May 26, 2020 (with Bert Loudis and Daniel Nguyen)