The Health Crisis and the Financial Situation of Households in France - A Study on Monthly Bank Data.

In view of the magnitude and the sudden nature of the health crisis in 2020, economists and statisticians have explored new sources of data to describe the development of the financial situation of households. The bank data used in this study, an anonymised panel of La Banque Postale customers, offer the twofold advantage of being able to be used practically in real time and of recording monthly (or even daily) changes in income, spending and wealth. First, we show that while the crisis affected incomes in a limited and temporary way in 2020 for most households (regardless of income level), populations on the margins of the labour market suffered more. We then specifically study the situation of recipients of the revenu de solidarité active (RSA), the French guaranteed minimum income. Although their social security benefits did not decrease in 2020, their incomes increased less than in a normal year because more of them did not return to employment. The exceptional government support paid out in May and November 2020 only partially counterbalanced these lower employment opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]