JUE Insight: Measuring local consumption with payment cards and cell phone pings
比较了支付卡交易和手机定位两种消费数据源，发现两者正相关但不完美；结合两者测量本地零售支出，能较好匹配政府汇总数据，并用于量化本地财政乘数。
We compare two widely used sources of consumption data: payment card transactions (from credit and debit cards) and cell phone location pings. We find they are positively but imperfectly correlated; payment card usage is higher among higher-income consumers, while cell phone pings only loosely track consumer spending. We develop a methodology that combines both sources to measure local retail spending and show that it closely tracks more aggregated government data. We illustrate its use by quantifying local fiscal multipliers. We show that the impacts of government spending shocks are highly localized, decay spatially, and are heterogeneous across store categories.