The EFS data also include information on method-of-payment. Purchases are identified as having been made with cash (this category also includes spending with a debit card), or having been made with a credit card. This makes it possible to distinguish the way that households spend out of current versus future income during the pay period. We lay the groundwork for our analysis with some simple descriptive statistics. Table 1 verifies that household characteristics are orthogonal to distance from payday, showing that sample means of household characteristics change very little with distance from payday. Thus, although we include demographics in our regressions to check whether these variables affect expenditure.
