"The Impact of COVID-19 on Income and Consumption Inequality in Spain: Real-Time Evidence from Big Data"

This project already monitors in real time banking data, anonymized and aggregated, of millions of clients (individuals and companies) of financial entities, with the aim of analyzing the evolution of their income and consumption patterns. In this way, and through massive data processing techniques, they will be able to know, for example, what percentage of people have seen their income drop during the pandemic and by what amount; or to calculate how much social inequalities would have increased if public compensations such as ERTEs or subsidies had not been implemented (subtracting those public revenues from the total, since these techniques allow filtering the data in maximum detail). The ultimate goal is to create tools or indexes that monitor these variables month by month to allow public decision-makers to take action at the moment, without having to wait for longer periods, such as those now necessary for official statistics. For this, they will have the collaboration of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance in Rome.