Initially, the economists expected that, as with previous recessions, the impacts would be concentrated on less-affluent areas, but the data surprised them. Workers were more likely to have lost their jobs in places like Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which lost nearly 90 percent of small business revenue—the restaurants and shoe stores and boutiques that had flourished in the wealthy ecosystem—than in the Bronx, where businesses lost only about 30 percent of their revenue. Chetty concluded that the decline in consumer spending wasn’t driven by the absence of money, it was driven by affluent
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