Association of COVID-19 stimulus receipt and spending with family health

Emma M. Reese; Noah Lines; Evan L. Thacker; Michael D. Barnes

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0328389

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionSeptember 7, 2022
3 Nov 2023 Decision Letter - Maurizio Fiaschetti, Editor Dear Dr. Reese, Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 18 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols . We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Maurizio Fiaschetti Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please ensure that you have specified (1) whether consent was informed and (2) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information. 3. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->?> Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available??> The PLOS Data policy Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English??> Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** Reviewer #1: This paper examines the association between COVID-19 stimulus checks and family health status. The authors collected approximately 500 data points and studies whether receiving full three stimulus checks is linked with better family health status and the heterogeneous effect across income groups. Major revision: (a) The authors described the sample collected through MTurk. It would help the readers to understand the MTurk sample by adding comparison with the representative census sample. (b) The survey asked about the stimulus check spendings. However, participants may not have a clear mental accounting of daily spending between the stimulus checks and their regular income. Thus adding a total spending question as an extra control will improve the result interpretation. (c) The authors did not clearly explain the exploratory factor analysis process. The methods were not clearly specified. And there lacks robustness check on how the variables changes with different selection rules or pre-specified number of variables. Additionally, the authors did not show the correlation across selected variables, thus hard to judge if the models would suffer from multicollinearity problem. (d) The authors fail to provide informative summary statistics. The paper aims to understand the difference between participants that receive three stimulus checks and those who did not receive all three. But the authors did not provide the difference of these two groups in the descriptive statistics section. (e) The main models in the paper use whether three checks received as the key varibles. It is worthy to discretize the key variable of interest into groups that receive one/two/three checks. Minor revision: (a) The paper did literature review in the introduction section. However, the authors did not fully specify how the paper relates to the existing literature until the final discussion. It would be helpful to make it clear in the introduction part. (b) Tables lack enough explanations. The authors should add more table notes. Reviewer #2: The authors aimed to determine the impact of U.S. government stimulus payments on family health during the COVID-19 the pandemic. This study can help to understand the impact of government assistance on overall family health. Considering the limitations mentioned by the authors, the study is well designed and the manuscript is by and large well developed. Here are just a few structural flaws, which are as follows: 1- It is suggested that in the background part of the Abstract, the objectives of the study should be expressed in the form of a brief statement rather than in the form of numbered hypotheses. 2- The introduction section is very long. Most of the content provided is related to the discussion section. It is necessary to review and summarize this part. 3- According to the guidelines of the journal, it is suggested that the objectives of the study should be expressed in a brief statement at the end of the Introduction section. 4- The final conclusion of the study should only be developed based on the main results of the study and content from other studies should not be presented and cited. Therefore, this section should be revised based on the results of the study and their implications. ****** what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes: Yaser Sarikhani ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328389.r001
Revision 1
16 Dec 2023 Author Response We would like to thank the reviewers for their suggestions. We have addressed and responded to each of the issues raised below. Reviewer #1 Major revision: (a) The authors described the sample collected through MTurk. It would help the readers to understand the MTurk sample by adding comparison with the representative census sample. - We appreciate the suggestion to describe the collection sample because it helps to clarify our sampling procedure through mTurk. We rewrote the sentence describing the mTurk sample in the Participants and Sampling paragraph to reflect better why and how the mTurk selection filters were created. We removed 'representative' because it suggests we sampled according to a representative census sample. We emphasize that our sample is aimed at specific qualification criteria, including marital status and lower income thresholds since those participants were most likely to qualify for the three stimulus checks. (b) The survey asked about the stimulus check spendings. However, participants may not have a clear mental accounting of daily spending between the stimulus checks and their regular income. Thus adding a total spending question as an extra control will improve the result interpretation. - We thank the reviewer for raising this question about the context of overall spending. The survey did not include a total spending question. We have added the following sentences to the Limitations paragraph in the Discussion section acknowledging this limitation: "The survey did not include questions about overall monthly or daily spending habits, which would have provided additional context to understand reasons for differences in stimulus check spending. However, we adjusted our models for income, which provides partial information about participants’ financial circumstances.” (c) The authors did not clearly explain the exploratory factor analysis process. The methods were not clearly specified. And there lacks robustness check on how the variables changes with different selection rules or pre-specified number of variables. Additionally, the authors did not show the correlation across selected variables, thus hard to judge if the models would suffer from multicollinearity problem. - We thank the reviewer for inviting us to explain the factor analysis more clearly. We made extensive revisions to the Spending Patterns Determination paragraph in the Methods section, not quoted here but shown in track changes in the manuscript. We also added information about the principal component analysis to Table 1, including Eigenvalues, percent variance explained, and communality estimates. Finally, we added a Supplemental Table containing the correlation matrix for the 18 variables that were considered in the principal component analysis. (d) The authors fail to provide informative summary statistics. The paper aims to understand the difference between participants that receive three stimulus checks and those who did not receive all three. But the authors did not provide the difference of these two groups in the descriptive statistics section. - We thank the reviewer for suggesting that we display descriptive statistics for the group of participants who received three stimulus checks and the group that received fewer than three stimulus checks. We have added two columns to Table 2 to display descriptive statistics for those groups. (e) The main models in the paper use whether three checks received as the key variables. It is worthy to discretize the key variable of interest into groups that receive one/two/three checks. - We thank the reviewer for suggesting that we analyze separately the groups who received only two checks or only one check. For our analyses, we had decided to dichotomize the number of checks received to the categories "three" vs "fewer than three" because of small sample sizes for the groups of survey respondents that received only two, only one, or no stimulus checks. We have added to Table 2 the percentages of participants who received zero (3.5%), one (3.7%), two (8.6%), or three (84.2%) stimulus checks. We have also added to the Stimulus Check paragraph of the Methods section the following explanation: "For analyses based on the number of checks received as an independent variable, we dichotomized the responses to “three checks” versus “fewer than three checks” because of relatively small sample sizes for groups that reported receiving only two, only one, or no stimulus checks." Minor revision: (a) The paper did literature review in the introduction section. However, the authors did not fully specify how the paper relates to the existing literature until the final discussion. It would be helpful to make it clear in the introduction part. - We thank the reviewer for suggesting we improve the introduction. We shortened the introduction to add clarity and make it more readable and shifted essential discussion-oriented elements to that section. This reviewer's observation helps improve both the introduction and discussion. (b) Tables lack enough explanations. The authors should add more table notes. - We thank the reviewer for suggesting to add more description to the tables. We have added notes to Table 3, and added more descriptive table titles, column headings, and row headings. We added a sentence at the beginning of the Stimulus Check Analysis paragraph in the Results section to clarify the table further: "In Table 3, we present mean scores on family health measures for groups of participants who received less than 3 checks and those who received 3 checks, low income and mid-to-high income groups, and differences in the mean family health scores across those groups." We have also added a Figure 1 Legend after the first reference to Figure 1 in the text which gives a more detailed description of the figure. Reviewer #2 1- It is suggested that in the background part of the Abstract, the objectives of the study should be expressed in the form of a brief statement rather than in the form of numbered hypotheses. - We thank the reviewer for the suggestion of simplifying our hypothesis into a brief statement. We have done so in both the Abstract and at the end of the Introduction (Purpose section). Our objective statement is as follows: "We hypothesized that receiving stimulus checks is associated with better family health and the effect of stimulus check receipt differs by income level. Additionally, we hypothesized that spending on immediate needs and paying off loans is associated with worse family health and the effects differ by income level." Further, we have removed reference to hypothesis numbers and replaced those references with more specific text regarding the objective statement in the Abstract, Introduction, and first paragraph of the Discussion section. 2- The introduction section is very long. Most of the content provided is related to the discussion section. It is necessary to review and summarize this part. - We thank the reviewer for suggesting we shorten the introduction. We shortened the introduction to make it more readable and shifted essential discussion-oriented elements to that section. This reviewer's observation helps improve both the introduction and discussion. 3- According to the guidelines of the journal, it is suggested that the objectives of the study should be expressed in a brief statement at the end of the Introduction section. - We thank the reviewer for the suggestion to add our hypothesis at the end of the Introduction (Purpose section) as a brief statement. We have done so and it appears as follows: "We hypothesized that receiving stimulus checks is associated with better family health and the effect of stimulus check receipt differs by income level. Additionally, we hypothesized that spending on immediate needs and paying off loans is associated with worse family health and the effects differ by income level." 4- The final conclusion of the study should only be developed based on the main results of the study and content from other studies should not be presented and cited. Therefore, this section should be revised based on the results of the study and their implications. - We thank the reviewer for the suggestion to adjust the conclusion. We have made changes to the conclusion, including removing citations and content from other studies. Please see the Implications and Conclusion section for those changes. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328389.r002
4 Nov 2024 Decision Letter - Maurizio Fiaschetti, Editor Dear Dr. Reese, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. plosone@plos.org . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols . Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols . We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Maurizio Fiaschetti Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author Reviewer #2: (No Response) Reviewer #3: (No Response) Reviewer #4: (No Response) ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions??> Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Partly ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->?> Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available??> The PLOS Data policy Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English??> Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ****** Reviewer #2: Considering the changes made in the text based on the comments of the first round of review, it seems that the authors have put enough effort to improve the the manuscript. Therefore, there is no more comment. Reviewer #3: 1. Perhaps I did not see, or my ignorance, but mTurk is unfamiliar to me ...if possible pls. add something from "Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development." 2."147 known as active response rate [2432]. The 500-participant sample size would allow sufficient 1" I see 456=n, please fix this minor item. 3. The paper defines income categories differently in various sections. For example, it mentions "<$25,000" as low income in one part, but later uses "<$40,000" as the low-income threshold. or perhaps it is on the cut-off, if possible please make it clearer. 4. The explanation of factor analysis mentions six factors, but Eigenvalues only exceed 1.0 for five factors. The text acknowledges this discrepancy without resolving it, raising doubts about whether the six-factor solution is valid (lines 226-229). A non-zero vector v is an eigenvector of A if Av = λv for some number λ, called the corresponding eigenvalue. The eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue is the direction with most variability, this eigenvector is the first principle component. It may be possible there is some factor instability drift and heteroscedasticity (which is fine), "Agrrawal and Clark. "ETF Betas: A Study of their Estimation Sensitivity to Varying Time Intervals." ETFs and Indexing (2007)", attribute factor/coefficient instability to heterogenous variance discontinuities and note their impact on multiple orthogonal factors for an overall ranking scale. A similar effect could slightly be at play here. Additionally data driven methods to identify spatial patterns by optimizing euclidean distances is utilized in "Heumann et al. Data-Driven Algorithm to Redefine the US Rural Landscape: Affinity Propagation as a Mixed-Data/Mixed-Method Tool. Economic Development Quarterly (2022)." 5. "Figure 1 Legend" section, where the explanation appears without proper figure presentation/title (lines 308-317), an appendix perhaps? 6. [line 84-86] Most U.S. research points to economic and employment constraints [10-12-14], interruptions to family routines [135], reduced quality of life and family well-being [810, 146], psychological distress [810, 157-179]. A recent large scale study using 2 million non-natural deaths using CDC and NVDRS data establishes a lagged link between finance induced stress and subsequent period suicides. (Sandweiss et al. "Suicides as a response to adverse market sentiment. PLoS One, 2017." A very good and robustly researched paper, a few clarifications and edits would increase its clarity and visibility. Best. Reviewer #4: Your data sources are complex, it may be difficult for researcher students to provide such data. You can mention an early stage AI knowledge paper that shows that the utilization of automated web-harvesting algorithms can easily provide the researcher with zero-cost machine readable datasets for further analysis. Some ambiguity wrt your eigenvector decomposition < 1 seems to exist. PCA modeling could be tightened. ****** what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy Reviewer #2: Yes: Yaser Sarikhani Reviewer #3: No Reviewer #4: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328389.r003
Revision 2
22 Apr 2025 Author Response Response to Reviewers We would like to thank the reviewers for their suggestions. We have addressed and responded to each of the issues raised below. Reviewer #3 1. Perhaps I did not see, or my ignorance, but mTurk is unfamiliar to me ...if possible pls. add something from "Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development." We appreciate the suggestion to elaborate on Amazon mTurk. We have added/revised some sentences in the “Participants and Sampling” paragraph to further explain how mTurk works: "MTurk is a crowdsourcing marketplace that businesses and individuals can use to outsource data collection and processing for various purposes, including research. MTurk users provide a sample more diverse than typical convenience samples, and complete tasks requested by researchers, such as surveys, data validation, and more. The mTurk users receive an incentive, typically financial compensation, for their work." 2."147 known as active response rate [2432]. The 500-participant sample size would allow sufficient 1" I see 456=n, please fix this minor item. We thank the reviewer for identifying this mistake. We have changed the manuscript to read, "The 456-participant sample size..." 3. The paper defines income categories differently in various sections. For example, it mentions "<$25,000" as low income in one part, but later uses "<$40,000" as the low-income threshold. or perhaps it is on the cut-off, if possible please make it clearer. We appreciate the reviewer identifying this discrepancy. The <$25,000 threshold mentioned in the paragraph on “Participants and Sampling” was used to ensure that the sample we gathered would include an adequate number of low income families. In contrast, the <$40,000 threshold mentioned in the paragraph on “Demographics” was used to define a low income category for the data analysis. We have revised both paragraphs to clarify this difference. 4. The explanation of factor analysis mentions six factors, but Eigenvalues only exceed 1.0 for five factors. The text acknowledges this discrepancy without resolving it, raising doubts about whether the six-factor solution is valid (lines 226-229). A non-zero vector v is an eigenvector of A if Av = λv for some number λ, called the corresponding eigenvalue. The eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue is the direction with most variability, this eigenvector is the first principle component. It may be possible there is some factor instability drift and heteroscedasticity (which is fine), "Agrrawal and Clark. "ETF Betas: A Study of their Estimation Sensitivity to Varying Time Intervals." ETFs and Indexing (2007)", attribute factor/coefficient instability to heterogenous variance discontinuities and note their impact on multiple orthogonal factors for an overall ranking scale. A similar effect could slightly be at play here. Additionally data driven methods to identify spatial patterns by optimizing euclidean distances is utilized in "Heumann et al. Data-Driven Algorithm to Redefine the US Rural Landscape: Affinity Propagation as a Mixed-Data/Mixed-Method Tool. Economic Development Quarterly (2022)." We thank the reviewer for suggesting that we clarify our rationale for retaining six factors when the sixth factor had an eigenvalue of 0.9 instead of >1.0. We did not rely solely on the eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule. We have revised the "Spending Patterns Determination" paragraph to explain our evaluation of the principal component analysis in more detail, including our rationale for retaining six factors. 5. "Figure 1 Legend" section, where the explanation appears without proper figure presentation/title (lines 308-317), an appendix perhaps? We thank the reviewer for recognizing this. Per PLOS One submission guidelines, "Figure captions are inserted immediately after the first paragraph in which the figure is cited. Figure files are uploaded separately." Figure 1 is first cited in the “Spending Factor Analysis” paragraph, therefore the Figure 1 legend is provided right after that paragraph, per journal instructions. There is an additional file that is uploaded separately from the manuscript file, labeled Fig 1. 6. [line 84-86] Most U.S. research points to economic and employment constraints [10-12-14], interruptions to family routines [135], reduced quality of life and family well-being [810, 146], psychological distress [810, 157-179]. A recent large scale study using 2 million non-natural deaths using CDC and NVDRS data establishes a lagged link between finance induced stress and subsequent period suicides. (Sandweiss et al. "Suicides as a response to adverse market sentiment. PLoS One, 2017." We appreciate the reviewer sharing this reference. We have now cited it to support the point about psychological distress. Reviewer #4 Your data sources are complex, it may be difficult for researcher students to provide such data. You can mention an early stage AI knowledge paper that shows that the utilization of automated web-harvesting algorithms can easily provide the researcher with zero-cost machine readable datasets for further analysis. We appreciate the reviewer's suggestion of using automated web-harvesting algorithms. However, we do not do that in our paper; we use Amazon mTurk to outsource survey responses from a more diverse population. Thus, it may not be applicable to our paper to make reference to such web-harvesting algorithms. Rather, we have added/revised some sentences in the “Participants and Sampling” paragraph to further explain how mTurk works: "MTurk is a crowdsourcing marketplace that businesses and individuals can use to outsource data collection and processing for various purposes, including research. MTurk users provide a sample more diverse than typical convenience samples, and virtually complete tasks requested by researchers, such as surveys, data validation, and more. The mTurk users receive an incentive, typically financial compensation, for their work." Some ambiguity wrt your eigenvector decomposition < 1 seems to exist. PCA modeling could be tightened. We thank the reviewer for suggesting that we clarify our rationale for retaining six factors when the sixth factor had an eigenvalue of 0.9 instead of >1.0. We did not rely solely on the eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule. We have revised the "Spending Patterns Determination" paragraph to explain our evaluation of the principal component analysis in more detail, including our rationale for retaining six factors. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328389.r004
1 Jul 2025 Decision Letter - Bruno Ventelou, Editor Association of COVID-19 stimulus receipt and spending with family health PONE-D-22-24977R2 Dear Dr. Reese, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Bruno Ventelou Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328389.r005
Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Bruno Ventelou, Editor PONE-D-22-24977R2 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Reese, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset You will receive further instructions from the production team, including instructions on how to review your proof when it is ready. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few days to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. You will receive an invoice from PLOS for your publication fee after your manuscript has reached the completed accept phase. If you receive an email requesting payment before acceptance or for any other service, this may be a phishing scheme. Learn how to identify phishing emails and protect your accounts at https://explore.plos.org/phishing. If we can help with anything else, please email us at customercare@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Bruno Ventelou Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328389.r006

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