We use novel and comprehensive monthly data on electronic payments, by municipality and sector, together with cash withdrawals, to study the impact of Covid‐19 in Portugal. Our difference‐in‐differences event study identifies a causal decrease of 17 and 40 percentage points on the year‐on‐year growth rate of overall purchases in March and April 2020. We document a stronger impact of the crisis in more central and more urban municipalities, due to a combination of the sectorial composition effect of the local economy and the sharper confinement behavioral effect in these locations. We discuss the importance of tourism for the results.
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Carvalho et al. (2021) studied this question.
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