Liberty Street Economics
Liberty Street Economics
Return to Liberty Street Economics Home Page

1 posts on "retail spending"
May 28, 2026

The Regional Side of the Story: K‑Shaped Pattern in Region, Wider Gap in Gas Spending

Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy

split image of two women: on the left an African American woman with cell phone boarding a bus; on the right, a Causasian woman leaning on a fancy red car looking at her cell phone and holding a coffee cup. She is at a gas statiion and the gas pumps are in the background.

In this post, we use the inaugural release of our regional consumer spending indicators to ask whether these patterns hold for a significant portion of the Second District, and how regional spending patterns by income have been similar to or different from the national patterns we documented earlier. We find similar K‑shaped patterns in both retail and gas spending in our region as we do in the nation, with the K‑shaped pattern in gasoline in response to the recent gas price shock being more pronounced in the region.

Continue reading »
Posted at 10:00 am in Inequality, K-Shaped Economy, New Jersey, New York | Permalink | Comments (0)

RSS RSS Feed

Twitter Follow Liberty Street Economics

WATCH: Liberty Street Economics 15th Anniversary
About the Blog

Liberty Street Economics features insight and analysis from New York Fed economists working at the intersection of research and policy. Launched in 2011, the blog takes its name from the Bank’s headquarters at 33 Liberty Street in Manhattan’s Financial District.

The editors are Michael Fleming, Thomas Klitgaard, Maxim Pinkovskiy, and Asani Sarkar, all economists in the Bank’s Research Group.

Liberty Street Economics does not publish new posts during the blackout periods surrounding Federal Open Market Committee meetings.

The views expressed are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve System.

Economic Research Tracker

Image of NYFED Economic Research Tracker IconLiberty Street Economics is available on the iPhone® and iPad® and can be customized by economic research topic or economist.

View by Topic

Most Read this Year

  1. Who Is Paying for the 2025 U.S. Tariffs?
  2. Are Businesses Absorbing the Tariffs or Passing Them On to Their Customers?
  3. Is College Still Worth It?
  4. When College Might Not Be Worth It
  5. Are Businesses Scaling Back Hiring Due to AI?
Comment Guidelines

 

We encourage your comments and queries on our posts and will publish them (below the post) subject to the following guidelines:

Please be brief: Comments are limited to 1,500 characters.

Please be aware: Comments submitted shortly before or during the FOMC blackout may not be published until after the blackout.

Please be relevant: Comments are moderated and will not appear until they have been reviewed to ensure that they are substantive and clearly related to the topic of the post.

Please be respectful: We reserve the right not to post any comment, and will not post comments that are abusive, harassing, obscene, or commercial in nature. No notice will be given regarding whether a submission will or will
not be posted.‎

Comments with links: Please do not include any links in your comment, even if you feel the links will contribute to the discussion. Comments with links will not be posted.

Send Us Feedback

Disclosure Policy

The LSE editors ask authors submitting a post to the blog to confirm that they have no conflicts of interest as defined by the American Economic Association in its Disclosure Policy. If an author has sources of financial support or other interests that could be perceived as influencing the research presented in the post, we disclose that fact in a statement prepared by the author and appended to the author information at the end of the post. If the author has no such interests to disclose, no statement is provided. Note, however, that we do indicate in all cases if a data vendor or other party has a right to review a post.

Archives