Revisiting H\"otte (2025): A Companion Analysis with Extended Evidence from UK Inter-Industry Payment Data, 2017-2024

TL;DR

This paper updates and extends H"otte (2025) by analyzing new, comprehensive UK inter-industry payment data from 2017 to 2024, highlighting methodological improvements and empirical insights for macroeconomic research.

Contribution

It provides an updated empirical validation of using detailed payment data for macroeconomic analysis, with methodological enhancements and new empirical findings.

Findings

Greater data coverage and granularity compared to previous studies

Identification of key empirical patterns in UK inter-industry payments

Discussion of methodological improvements and remaining challenges

Abstract

In 2025, the UK Office for National Statistics released a novel dataset of monthly inter-industry payment flows during January 2017 to November 2024 at the 5-digit SIC level (ONS, 2025a), covering $>$3.1 million UK organizations. Annual aggregates amount to 490 million transactions with an aggregate value of over {\pounds}3.1 trillion in 2023. Such publicly available data are unprecedented by their granularity and timeliness, providing a rich basis for economic research and real-time policy advice. H\"otte (2025) provided an empirical validation supplemented with conceptual discussions for using such bottom-up collected data in macroeconomic, industry-level, and economic network studies based on an earlier non-public and smaller version of the data. The novel data features much greater coverage, along with several methodological improvements. This paper gives an update on the earlier empirical results. It summarizes the major methodological changes of data construction, discusses key empirical observations, and their differences and consistencies relative to H\"otte (2025). It concludes by discussing the implications for using payment data and outlining remaining challenges and expected future developments.