The "border effect" literature finds that political borders have a very large impact on relative prices, implicitly adding several thousands of miles to trade. In this paper we show that the standard empirical specification suffers from selection bias, and propose a new methodology based on...

We study the daily behavior of supermarket prices and product availability following two recent natural disasters: the 2010 earthquake in Chile and the 2011 earthquake in Japan. In both cases there was an immediate and persistent effect on product availability. The number of goods available for...

Does membership in a currency union matter for a country's international relative prices? The answer to this question is critical for thinking about the implications of joining (or exiting) a common currency area. This paper is the first to use high-frequency good-level data to provide evidence...

Different theories of price stickiness have distinct implications on the number of modes in the distribution of price changes. We formally test for the number of modes in the price change distribution of 36 supermarkets, spanning 22 countries and 5 continents. We present results for three...

New data-gathering techniques, often referred to as “Big Data” have the potential to improve statistics and empirical research in economics. In this paper we describe our work with online data at the Billion Prices Project at MIT and discuss key lessons for both inflation measurement and...

We use a novel dataset of online prices of identical goods sold by four large global retailers in dozens of countries to study good-level real exchange rates and their aggregated behavior. First, in contrast to the prior literature, we demonstrate that the law of one price holds very well within...

We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely-matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by the International Comparisons Program...

I study how online competition, with its algorithmic pricing technologies and the transparency of the Internet, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that online competition has raised both the frequency of price changes...

We study the impact of targeted price controls for supermarket products in Argentina from 2007 to 2015. Using web-scraping, we collected daily prices for controlled and non-controlled goods and measured the differential effects on inflation, product availability, and price dispersion. We first...

When forming expectations, households may be influenced by the possibility that the information they receive is biased. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially-biased statistics using data from both a natural and a survey-based experiment obtained during a period of...