The Impact of Innovative Digital Coupon on the Post-Pandemic Recovery in China—an Almon Model Approach

Chinese government has distributed a large number of consumption coupons in 2020 to stimulate the consumption in restaurants, shopping malls and other brick-and-mortar stores hit hard by the pandemic. This paper aims to explore the question whether the current consumption coupon program implemented in the city level has a positive impact on consumption. This paper first uses hypothesis test but does not find prominent difference between cities issuing different amount of coupons. Furthermore, this paper uses the Distributed Lag model to figure out the numeric impact of coupons with the empirical estimation of lag weight and Almon method.