In macroeconomic models, the level of price dispersion - which is typically approximated through its relationship with inflation - is a central determinant of welfare, the cost of business cycles, the optimal rate of inflation, and the tradeoff between inflation and output stability. While the...

From a macroeconomic perspective, price rigidity is often perceived to be an important source of price dispersion, with significant implications for the dynamic properties of aggregate variables, welfare calculations, and the design of optimal policy. For instance, in standard New Keynesian...

We document empirical regularities of disaggregated inflation and consumption and study whether multisectoral New Keynesian models can explain them. We focus on higher moments of the inflation and consumption growth distributions as well as on the contemporaneous comovement of these two...

Using sectoral data at a medium level of aggregation, we find that price changes became less responsive to aggregate unemployment around 2009–2010. The slopes of the disaggregated Phillips curves diminished in many sectors, including housing and some services. We also document a decrease in...

Using highly disaggregated personal consumption expenditures data, I analyze whether the recent inflation run-up is explained by supply shocks more than by demand shocks, and whether these demand and supply shocks are likely persistent or transitory. I develop a new decomposition method that...