We develop and estimate a search model in which identical consumers trade with price-setting firms that differ in productivity. In the model, equilibrium distributions of both prices and markups are non-degenerate and continuous with a firm's price decreasing as its productivity increases....

Household inflation can be decomposed into three terms that reflect nominal expenditure, real quantities and household preferences, using the money pump proposed by Echenique, Lee and Shum (2011). I quantify the importance of changes in household preferences on household inflation rates using 11...

We investigate the macroeconomic impacts of mothballed businesses-those that closed temporarily-on sectoral equilibrium prices after a negative demand shock. First, we introduce a new establishment-level dataset derived from Google Places. We confirm the importance of temporary closures during...

This paper studies the behaviors of uncertainty through the lens of several popular models of expectation formation. The full-information rational expectations model (FIRE) predicts that both the ex ante uncertainty and the variance of ex post forecast errors are equal to the conditional...

Elevated inflation can threaten the credibility of central banks and increase the risk that inflation expectations do not remain anchored. Wage-price spirals might develop in such an environment, and high inflation could become entrenched. We quantitively assess the risks of a wage-price spiral...

We study how the interaction of market power and nominal price rigidity influences inflation dynamics. We formulate a tractable model of oligopolistic competition and sticky prices and derive closed-form expressions for the pass-through of idiosyncratic and common cost shocks to firms' prices....

We explain how the Bank of Canada's policy models capture the trade-off between output and inflation in Canada. We start by briefly revisiting the determinants of the New Keynesian Phillips curve. Next, we provide an overview of the Phillips curves that are currently embedded in the two main...

We assess whether unconventional monetary and fiscal policy implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. contribute to the 2021-2023 inflation surge through the lens of several different empirical methodologies-event studies, vector autoregressions, and regional panel regressions...

The arrival of immigrants increases demand for housing and puts upward pressure on shelter prices. Using instrumental variables based on the ancestry composition of residents in US counties, we estimate the causal impact of immigration on local shelter prices. We show that the impact of...

We disentangle the channels through which inflation expectations affect household spending. We conduct a survey featuring hypothetical scenarios that generate a controlled increase in inflation expectations. For 74% of households, current spending is unresponsive, typically due to fixed budget...