支付更多购买更少：2025年关税和美国家庭支出

Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.ISSN 1936-2854 (Print)ISSN 2767-3898 (Online) Paying More and Buying Less: 2025 Tariffs and U.S. HouseholdSpending Sinem Hacioglu-Hoke, Leo Feler 2026-035 NOTE: Staff working papers in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS) are preliminarymaterials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment.The analysis and conclusions set forthare those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or theBoard of Governors. References in publications to the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (other thanacknowledgement) should be cleared with the author(s) to protect the tentative character of these papers. Paying More and Buying Less: 2025Tariffs and U.S. Household Spending Sinem Hacıo˘glu-Hoke∗Federal Reserve BoardCEPRLeo Feler†Visiting EconomistFederal Reserve Bank of Chicago May 21, 2026 Abstract This paper estimates the effects of the 2025 U.S. tariffs on household spending usingtransaction-level data linked to tariff exposure and a tariff sentiment survey.Comparinghigh versus low tariff-exposed categories, we find 15 to 20 percent price pass-through. Atthe mean increase in tariff exposure, prices rise by 1 to 2 percent while spending falls byroughly 4 percent. Survey evidence linking stated intentions to revealed behavior identifiesa mechanism for the large spending response:reallocation toward essentials and trade-down within categories, concentrated among middle-income households with discretionaryslack who express tariff concerns. Low-income households bear a disproportionate welfareburden through regressive pass-through. Keywords: Tariffs, Pass through, Prices, Household Spending, Welfare, UncertaintyJEL Classification:F13, D12, E31 1Introduction In early 2025, the United States imposed broad-based tariffs covering virtually all ofits trading partners, leading to one of the most substantial shifts in U.S. trade policyin decades. How much of this shock households face or feel and how they respond hasbecome a central question for assessing its implications. A growing literature has madeprogress on the price side, documenting that pass-through to retail prices has so far beenpartial and gradual (Cavallo et al., 2025; Minton and Somale, 2025; Dvorkin et al., 2025;Barbiero and Stein, 2025; Hacıo˘glu-Hoke et al., 2026). Considerably less is known aboutthe subsequent margin of adjustment as to whether households continue to purchase thesame goods at higher prices, whether they reduce expenditure, and whether the responsevaries systematically across the income distribution. This paper takes up these questions using transaction-level data on over 125,000U.S. households observed continuously from January 2024 through December 2025. Thedata come from the Numerator household panel and record the price, quantity, andproduct attributes for household purchases from brick-and-mortar and online retailers andalso contain a rich set of household characteristics including income. The consumptioncategories that dominate the panel, including groceries, health and beauty, apparel, homegoods, and electronics, are precisely those that are most directly affected by tariffs ontraded goods. They are also the categories households weight most heavily when forminginflation expectations and adjusting spending decisions (D’Acunto et al., 2021; Weberet al., 2022), which makes them particularly salient for the questions we explore.Thecentral empirical advantage of the data is the joint observation of prices and quantities atthe household-product level. This allows us to estimate the price, spending, and quantityresponses to tariffs from a single source.For a subset of approximately 21,000 panelhouseholds, we further link the transaction records to a tariff sentiment survey fieldedby Numerator, which records tariff awareness, concern about price increases, and statedbehavioral intentions.The survey allows us to connect household beliefs to spendingbehavior and to distinguish price-driven responses from precautionary responses to tariffs. We link each purchase to a measure of tariff exposure constructed at the 4-digitHarmonized System level from U.S. Census monthly merchandise trade data, combining realized effective tariff rates with product-category import penetration.Our empiricalstrategy is a difference-in-differences design that compares categories with higher tariffexposure to categories with lower exposure before and after tariffs were implemented inFebruary 2025.We estimate the same specification on three outcomes: a Fisher priceindex constructed from the household data, real spending, and quantities purchased. We document three main findings.The first is that tariffs translate into substan-tially larger movements in spending than in prices. We report pass-through under twocomplementary treatment definitions that answer related but distinct questions. Usingthe realized tariff rate directly, which weights all product ca