Reported Preference vs. Revealed Preference: Evidence from the Propensity to Spend Tax Rebates

We evaluate the consistency of two methods for estimating the effect of an economic policy: i) surveying people to report the change in their behavior caused by the policy, ii) inferring this change using (reported) actual behavior and differences in treatment across people. Both methods have been widely used to measure propensities to spend. Using Federal stimulus payments disbursed quasi-randomly over time in 2008, we find greater revealed-preference estimates of spending by households reporting greater spending and the two methods produce similar estimates of average spending. But, counterfactually, reported preferences estimates are not higher for households with lower liquidity.