30/03/26
- Documents de travail
The Consumer City Revisited: Consumption Responses to Real-Time Population Presence
This paper combines high-frequency mobile phone location data with card transaction records, to examine the relationship between the number of individuals present in a zone ('real-time population') and economic transactions. Using data from the metropolitan area of Lyon, France's second-largest urban area, and a Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood estimator, we estimate the elasticity of transactions with respect to a real-time count of individuals present in each of over one thousand zones. We document three key findings: (1) consumption responsiveness varies systematically across time and space, with elasticities peaking at 1.08 on Saturday midday but declining to 0.98 on Sunday and ranging from 1.04 in urban cores to 0.84 in peripheries; (2) spatial frictions reduce transaction flows by 2% per 1% increase in distance from home; and (3) sectoral heterogeneity, where essential goods (e.g., food retail) consistently outperform discretionary sectors (e.g., arts and entertainment). Together, these results underscore how temporal, spatial, and sectoral factors jointly shape economic activity.
25/03/26
- Documents de travail
The Impact of Telework on Local Consumption : Evidence from Mobile Phone and Transaction Data
While previous studies examine the impact of telework on consumption either near residences or workplaces, the net effect on local demand remains unclear. Using high-frequency mobile phone and card transaction data from Lyon, France's second-largest metropolitan area, we identify two causal demand shocks: a 1pp increase in work-from-home presence raises local spending by 1%, and a 1pp decrease in workplace presence reduces spending by 1.3%. Aggregating these opposing effects, we find a small and statistically insignificant decline in weekday offline consumption, suggesting that most spending shifts from workplace to home. We find that working from home is associated with a moderate spatial shift of spending from urban cores to residential suburbs, and a slight sectoral reallocation from restaurants toward food retail and bars.
