Alina Malkova

Next step: applying the same framework to other Florida counties to see if the pattern holds. If you work on municipal finance, tourism economics, or post-pandemic fiscal dynamics — would love to hear what you’re seeing in your data.

By mid-2024 excess savings were essentially gone. And so was the revenue boost. For county budget planners, this is the key takeaway: the post-pandemic tourism surge was a fiscal sugar high, not a new baseline. Planning around it would be risky.

Unemployment told a counterintuitive story too. Pre-2022, higher unemployment actually correlated with higher bed tax revenue — possibly because unemployed locals traveled less, leaving more room for visiting tourists to dominate the tax base. After 2022, the conventional relationship returned.

Something interesting happened around 2022. Before that, higher personal income predicted higher tax revenue. After 2022, that relationship flipped — suggesting a compositional shift in who was visiting the Space Coast and how tourism demand was being driven.

The headline number: every $1 billion in excess savings depletion was associated with roughly $4,200 more in monthly bed tax revenue. That’s a meaningful fiscal boost for a single county — driven entirely by households spending down their pandemic nest eggs.

Brevard County bed tax revenues surged after COVID. But was this a genuine shift in tourism demand — or a temporary windfall? We linked monthly bed tax collections to the national drawdown of ~$2.1 trillion in pandemic-era excess savings to find out.

Decided to finally show up on #EconSky properly. What better way to start than sharing that our paper on Florida’s Space Coast bed tax collections just got accepted? TL;DR: pandemic savings drove a tourism boom, and when the savings ran out, so did the party. A thread on what we found 🧵

Knockin' on the bank's door: The impact of U.S. bank branch closures on self‐employment dynamics The U.S. bank branch network has contracted since the 2010s, limiting borrowers' access to credit institutions. This paper analyzes the changes in banks' branch concentration and their effect on borr...

. @amalkova.bsky.social of @floridatech.bsky.social analyzes the changes in banks' branch concentration and their effect on borrowers' choices of being self-employed.
#CreditMarket #LaborMobility #SelfEmployment