Household Financial Transaction Data

The growth of the availability and use of detailed household financial transaction microdata has dramatically expanded the ability of researchers to understand both household decision-making as well as aggregate fluctuations across a wide range of fields. This class of transaction data is derived from a myriad of sources including financial institutions, FinTech apps, and payment intermediaries. We review how these detailed data have been utilized in finance and economics research and the benefits they enable beyond more traditional measures of income, spending, and wealth. We discuss the future potential for this flexible class of data in firm-focused research, real-time policy analysis, and macro statistics.