Substantial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through casual contact in retail stores: Evidence from matched administrative microdata on card payments and testing.

This paper presents quasiexperimental evidence of Covid-19 transmission through casual contact between customers in retail stores. For a large sample of individuals in Denmark, we match card payment data, indicating exactly where and when each individual made purchases, with Covid-19 test data, indicating when each individual was tested and whether the test was positive. The resulting dataset identifies more than 100,000 instances where an infected individual made a purchase in a store and, in each instance, allows us to track the infection dynamics of other individuals who made purchases in the same store around the same time.

Consumer responses to the Covid-19 crisis: evidence from bank account transaction data.

This paper uses transaction-level bank account data from Denmark to study the dynamics of consumer spending during the Covid-19 pandemic. We document that aggregate spending initially dropped by almost 30% but recovered almost fully after the first wave. While spending plummeted in categories severely affected by supply restrictions, it increased in unaffected categories.

Social distancing laws cause only small losses of economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic in Scandinavia.

This paper uses real-time transaction data from a large bank in Scandinavia to estimate the effect of social distancing laws on consumer spending in the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The analysis exploits a natural experiment to disentangle the effects of the virus and the laws aiming to contain it: Denmark and Sweden were similarly exposed to the pandemic but only Denmark imposed significant restrictions on social and economic activities. We estimate that aggregate spending dropped by around 25% (95% CI: 24 to 26%) in Sweden and, as a result of the shutdown, by 4 additional percentage points (95% CI: 3 to 5 percentage points [p.