The economic rationale for whether you deserve a stimulus check

The economic rationale for whether you deserve a stimulus check

As the US House of Representatives prepares to vote on the country’s long-awaited Covid stimulus package, a relatively small (yet highly popular) part of that package has raised a pressing question: Who should receive the next round of stimulus checks? As it stands, the Democratic bill headed for a House vote this week includes $1,400 stimulus checks for individuals making up to $75,000, the same cutoff as in the previous stimulus rounds. The White House and Democratic lawmakers mostly got their answer from data compiled by a triad of economists—Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Michael Stepner of Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights—who teamed up early in the crisis to analyze how consumers spent the first two rounds of stimulus checks to better predict needs going forward.