Economist Hans Koster monitors the costs of COVID-19 for the retail sector. First, he will monitor pedestrians in shopping streets using WiFi access points from RMC, a consultancy company in retailing. When people have a smartphone they are automatically registered by these WiFi access points. These data are at a low level of spatial aggregation (i.e. exact locations within shopping streets for many different shopping streets in the Netherlands), and provide information on the crowdedness of shopping streets at each point in time.

The second step is to calculate losses of having fewer pedestrians due to COVID-19 using a methodology developed in Koster et al. (2019), which relies on data on property prices and vacancies.

Bron: website AYA

Afbeelding credits

Icon afbeelding: flickr