Loujaina Abdelwahed, assistant professor of economics, shares her research that used new anonymized transaction-level data on millions of households to develop real-time measures of consumer spending and income inequality. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting recession in 2020 offer lessons about why real-time data are crucial to understanding the scale of an economic crisis and determining the appropriate government response. In this talk, Professor Abdelwahed discusses the possibility of using real time data to estimate different economic variables, such as spending inequality since government surveys used to estimate inequality are often released with significant delays. Without a real-time measure of spending inequality, academics, and policymakers alike are blind to this important measure of economic welfare. She touches on the merits of the data, the methodology, the results, and the challenges of using real-time data in general.

The HSS Faculty Focus series is held in The Cooper Union Library.

Professor Abdelwahed is an applied economist with interest in empirical macroeconomics and development economics. Her research focuses on foreign aid and natural resources windfalls and their impact on public finance. Her recent work focuses on the relationship between fiscal dependency on natural resources and individual wellbeing in terms of income and consumption inequality. She received her B.A. in economics from the American University in Cairo and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago.