---
title: "How Are Firms Using Their Tariff Refunds?"
authors: "Jose Maria Barrero; Nick Bloom; Steven J. Davis; Kevin Foster; Aaron Jalca; Brent Meyer; Emil Mihaylov; Michael Navarrete"
source: "Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta — Policy Hub Macroblog"
source_url: "https://www.atlantafed.org/research-and-data/publications/policy-hub-macroblog/2026/09/21/how-are-firms-using-tariff-refunds"
paper_id: "atlanta_fed_macroblog_tariff_refunds_2026"
harvested: 2026-09-29
year: 2026
keywords: [tariffs, trade policy, refunds, firm surveys, pass-through]
kind: reference
topic: "tariffs"
added_by: stratmac
added_date: 2026-09-29
pdf_url: ""

## Summary

Atlanta Fed Policy Hub Macroblog post (2026-09-21). Firms that paid tariffs ruled
unlawful are due refunds, and the post examines how recipients expect to use the
windfall. Using recent survey data (the same firm panel behind the Atlanta Fed's
inflation-expectations work), the authors report that planned uses vary widely
across recipients rather than clustering on a single response, and they scrutinise
the range of reported expectations. No PDF: this is a blog post, not a working paper.

## Why it belongs here

Directly bears on the tariff/duty-channel cards. If tariff refunds are expected to
flow to a spread of uses rather than one — investment, debt, distribution, prices —
then a single assumed pass-through or demand coefficient on tariff shocks is the
wrong shape, in the same way the shipping-cost pass-through work finds the response
is regime-dependent rather than linear.

## Provenance

Title, author list, date and the abstract sentence above are taken verbatim from the
Atlanta Fed Policy Hub notification email of 2026-09-21 and the live page (verified
HTTP 200, 2026-09-29). No number is quoted here because the notification carried
none; the magnitudes are in the post itself and have not been extracted.