How do import prices respond to exchange rate changes, and does this response vary across products or across time? We document two new and related facts: 1. Individual items with high price change variance have greater exchange rate pass-through. 2. During times when the cross-sectional variance of price changes is high, there is greater exchange rate pass-through. We show that these results are not driven by differences in the frequency of adjustment across products or time. We explore the extent to which these facts can be explained by time-varying product level volatility and their implications for aggregate inflation and monetary policy. Existing work has documented that trade prices declined only modestly in 2008 at the same time that trade volumes collapsed. Our evidence makes this fact even more puzzling, since pass-through is unusually high during this same period.
