What are the unequal effects of changes in consumer prices on the cost What are the unequal effects of changes in consumer prices on the cost of living? In the context of changes in import prices (driven by, e.g., changes in trade costs or exchange rates), most analyses focus on variation across...

Consumers access foreign goods by purchasing them domestically or shopping abroad. We present new facts on cross-border shopping by Swiss households showing, for example, that prices of identical products are lower in neighboring countries, cross-border shopping shares fall with distance to the...

We document how product quality responds to exchange rate movements and quantify the extent to which these quality changes affect the aggregate pass-through into export prices. We analyze the substantial sudden appreciation of the Swiss franc post removal of the 1.20-CHF-per-euro lower bound in...

After the financial crisis of 2008, central banks around the world have increased their communication efforts to reach consumers, with the aim of both guiding and anchoring their inflation expectations. For the expectations channel of monetary policy to work as intended, central banks need a...

In this paper, we explore the degree of anchoring of consumers' individual long-run inflation expectations utilizing the University of Michigan Survey of Consumer's rotating panel micro-structure. Our results indicate that long-run inflation expectations became more anchored over the last...

We study the effects of forward-looking communication in an environment of rising inflation rates on German consumers' inflation expectations using a randomized control trial. We show that information about rising inflation increases short- and long-term inflation expectations. This initial...

Using a new consumer survey dataset, we show that macroeconomic preferences affect expectations and economic decisions through different channels. While household expectations are on average inversely related to preferences, households with the same inflation or interest rate expectations can...