IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0187031.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Socioeconomic characterization of regions through the lens of individual financial transactions

Author

Listed:
  • Behrooz Hashemian
  • Emanuele Massaro
  • Iva Bojic
  • Juan Murillo Arias
  • Stanislav Sobolevsky
  • Carlo Ratti

Abstract

People are increasingly leaving digital traces of their daily activities through interacting with their digital environment. Among these traces, financial transactions are of paramount interest since they provide a panoramic view of human life through the lens of purchases, from food and clothes to sport and travel. Although many analyses have been done to study the individual preferences based on credit card transaction, characterizing human behavior at larger scales remains largely unexplored. This is mainly due to the lack of models that can relate individual transactions to macro-socioeconomic indicators. Building these models, not only can we obtain a nearly real-time information about socioeconomic characteristics of regions, usually available yearly or quarterly through official statistics, but also it can reveal hidden social and economic structures that cannot be captured by official indicators. In this paper, we aim to elucidate how macro-socioeconomic patterns could be understood based on individual financial decisions. To this end, we reveal the underlying interconnection of the network of spending leveraging anonymized individual credit/debit card transactions data, craft micro-socioeconomic indices that consists of various social and economic aspects of human life, and propose a machine learning framework to predict macro-socioeconomic indicators.

Suggested Citation

  • Behrooz Hashemian & Emanuele Massaro & Iva Bojic & Juan Murillo Arias & Stanislav Sobolevsky & Carlo Ratti, 2017. "Socioeconomic characterization of regions through the lens of individual financial transactions," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(11), pages 1-20, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0187031
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187031
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187031
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187031&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0187031?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Marc Rysman, 2007. "An Empirical Analysis Of Payment Card Usage," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(1), pages 1-36, March.
    2. Ron Borzekowski & K. Kiser Elizabeth & Ahmed Shaista, 2008. "Consumers' Use of Debit Cards: Patterns, Preferences, and Price Response," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 40(1), pages 149-172, February.
    3. Stanislav Sobolevsky & Izabela Sitko & Remi Tachet des Combes & Bartosz Hawelka & Juan Murillo Arias & Carlo Ratti, 2016. "Cities through the Prism of People’s Spending Behavior," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(2), pages 1-19, February.
    4. Buckinx, Wouter & Van den Poel, Dirk, 2005. "Customer base analysis: partial defection of behaviourally loyal clients in a non-contractual FMCG retail setting," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 164(1), pages 252-268, July.
    5. Scholnick, Barry & Massoud, Nadia & Saunders, Anthony, 2013. "The impact of wealth on financial mistakes: Evidence from credit card non-payment," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 26-37.
    6. Duncan J. Watts, 2007. "A twenty-first century science," Nature, Nature, vol. 445(7127), pages 489-489, February.
    7. Li, Baibing & Martin, Elaine B. & Morris, A. Julian, 2002. "On principal component analysis in L1," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 40(3), pages 471-474, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gutiérrez, Antonio, 2022. "Movilidad urbana y datos de alta frecuencia [Urban mobility and high frequency data]," MPRA Paper 114854, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lola Hernandez & Nicole Jonker & Anneke Kosse, 2017. "Cash versus Debit Card: The Role of Budget Control," Journal of Consumer Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(1), pages 91-112, March.
    2. Schuh, Scott & Stavins, Joanna, 2010. "Why are (some) consumers (finally) writing fewer checks? The role of payment characteristics," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(8), pages 1745-1758, August.
    3. Tobias Trütsch, 2016. "The impact of mobile payment on payment choice," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 30(3), pages 299-336, August.
    4. John Bagnall & David Bounie & Kim P. Huynh & Anneke Kosse & Tobias Schmidt & Scott Schuh, 2016. "Consumer Cash Usage: A Cross-Country Comparison with Payment Diary Survey Data," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 12(4), pages 1-61, December.
    5. Zinman, Jonathan, 2009. "Debit or credit?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 358-366, February.
    6. Nicole Jonker & Anneke Kosse & Lola Hernández, 2012. "Cash usage in the Netherlands: How much, where, when, who and whenever one wants?," DNB Occasional Studies 1002, Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department.
    7. Arango, Carlos & Huynh, Kim P. & Sabetti, Leonard, 2015. "Consumer payment choice: Merchant card acceptance versus pricing incentives," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 130-141.
    8. Joanna Stavins, 2017. "How do consumers make their payment choices?," Research Data Report 17-1, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    9. Naoki Wakamori & Angelika Welte, 2017. "Why Do Shoppers Use Cash? Evidence from Shopping Diary Data," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 49(1), pages 115-169, February.
    10. Ching, Andrew T. & Hayashi, Fumiko, 2010. "Payment card rewards programs and consumer payment choice," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(8), pages 1773-1787, August.
    11. Arango, Carlos & Huynh, Kim P. & Sabetti, Leonard, 2011. "How do you pay? The role of incentives at the point-of-sale," Working Paper Series 1386, European Central Bank.
    12. Kosse, Anneke, 2013. "Do newspaper articles on card fraud affect debit card usage?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(12), pages 5382-5391.
    13. Wilko Bolt & Sujit Chakravorti, 2010. "Digitization of Retail Payment," DNB Working Papers 270, Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department.
    14. Sean Connolly & Joanna Stavins, 2015. "Payment instrument adoption and use in the United States, 2009–2013, by consumers' demographic characteristics," Research Data Report 15-6, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    15. Stanislav Sobolevsky & Izabela Sitko & Remi Tachet des Combes & Bartosz Hawelka & Juan Murillo Arias & Carlo Ratti, 2016. "Cities through the Prism of People’s Spending Behavior," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(2), pages 1-19, February.
    16. Kosse, Anneke & Jansen, David-Jan, 2013. "Choosing how to pay: The influence of foreign backgrounds," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(3), pages 989-998.
    17. Daniel Grodzicki & Alexei Alexandrov & Özlem Bedre-Defolie & Sergei Koulayev, 2023. "Consumer Demand for Credit Card Services," Journal of Financial Services Research, Springer;Western Finance Association, vol. 63(3), pages 273-311, June.
    18. Klee, Elizabeth, 2008. "How people pay: Evidence from grocery store data," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(3), pages 526-541, April.
    19. Fumiko Hayashi & Joanna Stavins, 2012. "Effects of credit scores on consumer payment choice," Public Policy Discussion Paper 12-1, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    20. Tamás Briglevics & Scott Schuh, 2020. "This Is What's in Your Wallet...and Here's How You Use It," Working Papers 20-04, Department of Economics, West Virginia University.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0187031. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.