Yves here. For those with the means (or the good fortune to live in countries with adequate safety nets), hunkering down with Covid has eliminated or reduced spending on personal services, travel, and entertainment. One of my road warrior friends who made a point of making sure her conference schedule allowed her to see opera in Vienna and theater in London says she doesn’t miss the travel and that pretty much everyone who used to go on these junkets has worked out that they were big time and money sinks. This article describes similar changes in not just habits but also preferences among consumers, at least in Europe. If nothing else, it’s allowed introverts to stay home and not be apologetic.

However, a countervailing data point is that a friend still in Manhattan just dropped off a big load of dry cleaning. The manager said they were busy, which seems surprising given that all those people not going to offices are supposedly hanging out in sweats. He said that clients were still dressing up at home to be festive and spilling wine on themselves as before.

Mind you, I’m not endorsing the Mellonite view in this article, particularly since if the authors were to adhere to it, airlines would be close to the front of the line of companies that would be allowed to fail. While there is an economic cost in preserving enterprises that have questionable futures given Covid’s restructuring of the economy, the flip side is that some countries have decided to allow inefficient sectors to survive to preserve employment. Japan’s retail sector, with small shops in many urban neighborhoods, is a textbook example.

And let us not kid ourselves that a lot of the restructuring that is going on isn’t even remotely related to efficiency but preserving the pay and perks of the top brass. Look at colleges and universities, where in some cases entire departments and programs are being shuttered, yet senior level administrator jobs are untouched.

By Alexander Hodbod, Counsellor to ECB Representative to the Supervisory Board, ECB; Cars Hommes, Professor of Economic Dynamics at CeNDEF, Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam; Stefanie J. Huber, Assistant Professor, Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam; and Isabelle Salle, Principal Researcher, Bank of Canada. Originally published at VoxEU

The profound and protracted experience of the COVID-19 crisis may fundamentally change consumer preferences. This column reveals how a representative consumer survey in five EU countries indicates that many consumers do not miss certain goods and services they have cut down on since the COVID-19 outbreak. It concludes that fiscal policy must recognise that some firms will become obsolete in the altered post-COVID-19 environment. To achieve a swift recovery, these obsolete firms must be allowed to fail fast so that resources can be reallocated to more efficient uses.

From the outset of the COVID-19 crisis, there has been a rich debate on the appropriate fiscal response. Soon after the crisis began, analysts quickly diagnosed the huge consequences it would entail for the macroeconomy (e.g. McKibbin et al. 2020,  Gopinath 2020). Major negative impacts would arise from both the demand and supply side (Brinca et al. 2020). The economics profession strongly encouraged governments to swiftly pursue aggressive fiscal expansion to help keep employers afloat and to maintain household solvency (e.g. Gourinchas 2020, Goldberg 2020). Governments across the developed world have heeded this advice, introducing unprecedented broad-based support measures such as furlough schemes, loan moratoria, and outright subsidies for struggling firms. These economy-wide responses allowed those sectors of the economy impacted by social-distancing measures a chance to survive the initial COVID-19 shock.  However, as the duration and the extent of the crisis are becoming clear, governments must ask themselves how to hone their continuing support to the economy to transition to the post-COVID-19 equilibrium.

In particular, the longer the crisis lasts and the more profound the experience of it is, the higher the chances that the post-COVID-19 economy will look fundamentally different from what preceded it. If consumer preferences have fundamentally shifted in response to the COVID-19 experience, some firms and potentially some entire sectors will become obsolete. Fiscally bailing out such obsolete firms on an ongoing basis will, in the long run, merely create unsustainable ‘zombies’ and mismatch unemployment. Concerns about zombification are also growing due to the current extreme liquidity that exists in debt markets and the associated corporate debt overhang that is building up (Jordá et al. 2020).

Our recent paper (Hodbod et al. 2020) seeks to provide insight into how different the post-COVID-19 equilibrium might be from what preceded it by using a cross-country survey of five European countries. In line with existing recent country-specific studies looking at France (Bounie et al. 2020), Spain (Carvalho et al. 2020), the US (Coibion et al. 2020), South Korea (Kim et al. 2020), and the Netherlands (Golec et al. 2020), we observe major consumption drops across sectors since the COVID-19 outbreak. We contribute to this related descriptive literature by analysing the data on households’ self-reported reasons for their consumption shifts. Thus we provide initial evidence on the nature of the COVID-19 demand shock and on how durable the reported consumption shifts could turn out in the post-COVID-19 environment.

Sector-Specific Shifts in Consumer Preferences

A sample of 1,500 representative households per country was surveyed in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. We collected the data after the first lockdown experience in July 2020, at a point when those initial restrictions were completely lifted. The survey asked households how their current consumption compares to before the COVID-19 outbreak for five key sectors (tourism, hospitality, services, retail, and public transport).  We find that a substantial fraction of households decreased their consumption across all sectors, with the largest drops in Spain and Italy. Overall, tourism was the most negatively impacted sector (66%), followed by public transport (58%), hospitality (55%), retail (46%), and services (38%) (see Figure 1).

Households were specifically asked to state the primary reason for their consumption changes. We focused on five self-reported drivers of consumption changes: (1) financial constraints, (2) worry of infection risk, (3) a lack of confidence in the future that induces a rise in precautionary savings, (4) substitution to online alternatives, or (5) permanent shifts in taste and preferences arising from the lockdown experience. This design allows us to reveal the underlying drivers for reported consumption changes and thereby to shed light on the nature of the COVID-19 demand shock. Are we merely experiencing a transitory income shock? Or a shock to consumer confidence? Or is the COVID-19 experience a game-changer, creating permanent changes in consumer preferences?

Figure 1 Fraction of households that consume less compared to before the COVID-19 outbreak (selected sectors)

Signs of Substantial Long-Term Structural Consumption Preference Changes

Lockdowns and travel restrictions were lifted in the countries during the time of the survey. Figure 1 shows that, despite this, a large fraction of households report reducing their consumption compared to before the COVID-19 outbreak. Analysing respondents’ feedback on their underlying motivation for changing consumption habits shows that a substantial fraction of households report what seems to be a durable shift in preferences. In France, Germany, and the Netherlands, “the realisation of not missing it” is the second biggest explanatory factor that respondents cite to explain their reduced consumption.¹

Households’ permanent preference shifts are particularly observed in the services sector (such as hairdressers) and the hospitality industry (i.e. restaurants). For example, the fraction of households that realized that they do not miss services such as hairdressers amounts to 23% in France, 19% in Germany and Italy, 14% in the Netherlands, and 10% in Spain. At the same time, the fraction of households that realised that they do not miss going to restaurants amounts to 19% in France, 21% in Germany, 18% in Italy, 15% in the Netherlands, and 9% in Spain (Figure 2).

Slightly behind the fraction of respondents that don’t miss consuming the products and services in question, another substantial fraction cite precautionary saving motives. This saving motive is the second most cited reason for reduced consumption in Italy and Spain, and the third most popular in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Within this segment of respondents, one may speculate that underlying permanent preference shifts could be taking place. Amongst those having chosen to forego certain consumption goods and services for an elongated period, a proportion may end up shifting their consumption patterns permanently as they adapt to living without them.

Beyond the question of how much households are consuming, one must also reflect upon how they are making their purchases. For instance, amongst respondents indicating a reduction in their shopping at malls and other stores, a significant number report that this was due to substitution into online alternatives.  The fraction of households reporting online substitution as the main reason for shopping less in malls and other stores is highest in France with 16% and lowest in Germany with 9%. As the crisis becomes prolonged, consumers may become accustomed to this new way of consumption, which could lead to a long-term shift in the retail sector away from high-street shops.

Figure 2 Reasons for consumption reduction (selected sectors)

The Crucial Factor: Personal Experience with COVID-19 Infections and the Severity of the Health Crisis

On an aggregate level, the fraction of households reporting to be reducing their consumption compared to before the COVID-19 outbreak is highly correlated with the number of deaths per million of the population and personal infection experience during the preceding lockdown. We exploit the heterogeneous severity of the health crisis across the five countries surveyed to investigate what drives households’ reduced consumption in each sector. Using probit regression models, we find that gender is the only socioeconomic household characteristic that is consistently and significantly associated with consumption changes. Standard socioeconomic household characteristics such as income, age, employment status, and education play a negligible role. Instead, behavioural factors such as macroeconomic expectations (pessimism) and psychological factors (such as worries and fear) are powerful explanatory factors underlying households’ consumption drops in all sectors.  These behavioural factors are highly correlated with the severity of the health crisis and with personal experiences of COVID-19 infections within respondents’ family and friend networks.

Honing Fiscal Policy to Prepare for the Post-COVID Era

Despite the recent positive vaccine news, it remains clear that the risk of infection will unfortunately remain with us still for quite some time. Nonetheless, governments must begin to plot a policy pathway out of the crisis and towards a new post-COVID equilibrium. Our results suggest two conclusions that policymakers should keep in mind to ease this transition.

First, our indicators of long-term shifts in consumer preferences should serve as a warning against maintaining broad-based horizontal fiscal support to firms for an extended period. Given the scale of the shock and the profundity of the experience, some fundamental changes to consumer preferences are likely. The shift to a post-COVID equilibrium will therefore require some obsolete firms to leave the market, allowing resources to be reallocated into new sectors that better reflect consumer demand.

Second, until the health crisis is over, governments should avoid seeing their dual objectives of protecting citizens from virus risk and preserving economic prosperity as a trade-off. Our results instead suggest that governments should see controlling infection risk as a prerequisite to preserving economic prosperity.

Authors’ note: The views expressed here are our own and do not represent those of the ECB, the Eurosystem, or the Bank of Canada.

See original post for references