Using a survey of households in the Nielsen Consumer Panel and the randomized timing of disbursement of the 2008 Economic Stimulus Payments, we find that a household's spending rose by ten percent the week it received a Payment and remained high cumulating to 1.5-3.8 percent of spending over...

Between 1992 and 2002, the Japanese Import Price Index (IPI) registered a decline of almost 9 percent and Japan entered a period of deflation. We show that much of the correlation between import prices and domestic prices was due to formula biases. Had the IPI been computed using a pure...

Since the seminal work of Krugman, product variety has played a central role in models of trade and growth. In spite of the general use of love-of-variety models, there has been no systematic study of how the import of new varieties has contributed to national welfare gains in the United States....

Since Friedman (1953), an advantage often attributed to flexible exchange rate regimes over fixed regimes is their ability to insulate more effectively the economy against real shocks. I use a post-Bretton Woods sample (1973-96) of seventy-five developing countries to assess whether the...

Large differences in national price levels exist across countries. In this paper, I develop a general equilibrium model predicting that these differences should be related to countries’ exchange rate regimes. My empirical findings confirm that countries with fixed exchange rate regimes have...

Sharp swings in a developing country's terms of trade, the price of its exports relative to the price of its imports, can seriously disrupt output growth. An analysis of the effects of a decline in export prices in seventy-five developing economies suggests that countries with a flexible...

In this paper, we revisit two pieces of conventional wisdom in the current debate about poverty, paying close attention to the price data underlying these findings: that the poor pay more than households of higher income for the goods and services they purchase; and that poverty rates, at least...