Isaac Delestre

The pandemic has had profound consequences for incomes, spending, saving, and financial distress. In this event we brought together evidence from a number of recent pieces of research which use bank account data to shed light on these issues.

Each year early career economists at IFS deliver a day of public economics talks, aimed at A-level and undergraduate students who have an interest in economics or might want to pursue a career in public policy research. As part of this year’s Festival of Social Science, we live streamed a selection of lectures from the series.

In this report, we use a novel source of real-time data on households’ finances from Money Dashboard, a budgeting app, to explore the impacts of the crisis so far on earnings, incomes and financial distress, and how they are evolving. We complement this with household survey data to explain and verify the key trends.