Recent theoretical work has suggested a number of potentially important factors in causing incomplete pass-through of exchange rates to prices, including markup adjustment, local costs and barriers to price adjustment. We empirically analyze the determinants of incomplete pass-through in the...

A common approach to measuring price changes is to look at the change of the expenditure needed to purchase a fixed basket of goods. It is well-known that this approach suffers from problems and creates several biases in the measurement of price changes faced by consumers. Substitution and...

Consumers often benefit from increased competition in differentiated product settings. In this paper we consider consumer benefits from increased competition in a differentiated product setting: the spread of non-traditional retail outlets. In this paper we estimate consumer benefits from...

Hausman (2003) discusses four sources of bias in the present calculation of the CPI. A pure price' index based approach of surveying prices as done by the BLS cannot succeed in solving the problems of bias. We discuss economic and econometric approaches to measuring the first order bias effects...

We report results from a validation study of Nielsen Homescan data. We use data from a large grocery chain to match thousands of individual transactions that were recorded by both the retailer (at the store) and the Nielsen Homescan panelist (at home). First, we report how often shopping trips...

We provide new time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. These estimates are based on a new identification strategy that exploits systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles as an instrument for house prices. Our estimates of housing...

Business cycle recoveries have slowed in recent decades. This slowdown comes entirely from female employment: as women's employment rates converged towards men's over the course of the past half-century, the growth rate of female employment slowed. But does the slowdown in the growth of female...

We use rich historical data on military procurement spending across U.S. regions to estimate the effects of government spending in a monetary union. Aggregate military build-ups and draw- downs have differential effects across regions. We use this variation to estimate an "open economy relative...

We provide new estimates of the importance of growth rate and uncertainty shocks for developed countries. The shocks we estimate are large and correspond to well-known macroeconomic episodes such as the Great Moderation and the productivity slowdown. We compare our results to earlier estimates...

The microdata underlying U.S. import and export price indexes exhibit frequent product turnover and highly rigid prices. As a consequence, 40% of products are replaced before a single price change is observed and 70% are replaced after two price changes or less. An aggregate price index that...