The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on consumer behavior and lifestyle. After the outbreak, people increased their daily spending at supermarkets and drugstores near their homes but reduced it on dining out and entertainment activities around urban offices. Additionally, they increased their use of online shopping and cashless payments. This study examines how consumer behavior changed before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of expenditure items, store categories, payment methods, and purchase times, as well as the attributes of consumers associated with these changes using high-frequency purchasing panel data in Japan. In conclusion, since the outbreak of the pandemic, consumption in general has declined, especially amongst high-income consumers who save because of fewer opportunities for face-to-face consumption. The study also shows that single young women have increased their online consumption, while the gender gap in purchasing at supermarkets, drugstores and department stores has decreased. Furthermore, we find that there is generally no significant relationship between family structure and consumption. This may suggest that apart from government cash transfers, ensuring consumption opportunities is important for the recovery of consumption.

This study examines how listed firms have managed their cash holdings since the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, using quarterly data on publicly-traded firms in Japan. After providing an overview of developments in cash holdings since the start of the crisis, we focus on the precautionary motive for corporate cash holdings and examine the role of firms’ cash flow and volatility therein in firms’ cash holdings to find the following: (1) corporate cash holdings have increased rather than decreased since the start of the crisis; (2) an increase in firms’ cash flow has a positive impact on their cash holdings during normal times, and the sensitivity of cash holdings to cash flows was more pronounced during the first three months of the crisis; (3) firms facing higher sales volatility held more cash in the second three-month period following the start of the crisis; and (4) the cash flow sensitivity of financially constrained firms’ cash holdings during the crisis period increased more than that of unconstrained firms. Overall, even though the COVID-19 crisis is different from the previous financial crises such as the Global Financial Crisis in that it was not originated in the financial sector, the pandemic crisis has had a substantial impact on corporate cash management strategies and the results are consistent with the precautionary motive theory for cash holdings.

Since 2020, the international community has been threatened by the new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Governments are under pressure to stop the spread of infection while continuing economic activities. This study examines the effects of containment policies and financial support based on the susceptible-infected-macro model. Results show that an immediate containment policy is effective, and strong financial support is effective from viewpoint of maintaining economic activity.

The aim of our study is to determine the characteristics of inflation expectations during the early period of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Japan based on panel data. We examined this main hypothesis: vulnerable people tend to have higher inflation expectations as shown by two points. First, the finding that women who are seen as vulnerable have higher inflation expectations is strongly robust. Second, vulnerable people who have a negative perception of their standard of living and the socioeconomic environment also have higher inflation expectations.