Selected publications
NBER Working Paper Series, No. 27352
The Covid-19 Pandemic led to changes in expenditure patterns that can introduce significant bias in CPI inflation. Using publicly available card-transaction data, this paper updates official CPI weights and recalculates inflation with Covid consumption baskets. It finds that the US CPI underestimated Covid inflation, with similar evidence in 12 of 19 additional countries.
American Economic Review: Insights, Vol. 3, Issue 1, March 2021
Using data collected at the border and at retailers, this research studies the effects of recent US tariffs on importers, consumers, and exporters. Tariffs were almost fully passed through to prices paid by importers, while effects on retail prices were more mixed and retaliatory tariffs led US exporters to lower prices.
Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 103, No. 1, March 2021
Daily supermarket prices from Argentina are used to examine targeted price controls. The controls had a small, temporary effect on inflation; controlled goods remained available; and firms introduced new product varieties at higher prices, increasing price dispersion.
Jackson Hole Economic Symposium — Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 2018
Online competition, algorithmic pricing, and price transparency have raised the frequency of price changes and increased uniform pricing across US locations. These changes make retail prices more sensitive to nationwide shocks, including gas prices and exchange-rate fluctuations.
American Economic Association — Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 108: 483–487
Online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities with closely matched goods and identical methods across countries, producing more current estimates of real consumption without relying on consumer-price-index extrapolations.
American Economic Review, Vol. 107, No. 1, January 2017
A large-scale comparison of prices collected simultaneously from websites and physical stores at 56 retailers in 10 countries finds identical price levels about 72 percent of the time. Price changes are not synchronized, but have similar frequencies and average sizes.
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016, Vol. 30(2): 151–178
This overview describes how online prices can improve economic measurement and research, construct daily price indexes across countries, and reduce measurement biases that distort evidence on price stickiness and international relative prices.
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Vol. 9, No. 3, July 2017
Survey experiments show that people in lower-inflation contexts have weaker priors about inflation, consistent with rational inattention. Cognitive limits also matter: even when official information is readily available, households continue to rely on memories of supermarket price changes.
Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 100, No. 1, March 2018
Daily online prices from five countries show longer durations, fewer near-zero price changes, and initially increasing hazard functions. Time averaging and price imputation can explain key differences from earlier results based on scanner and CPI data.
Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 129, No. 2, May 2014
Prices of identical goods sold by four global retailers show that the law of one price holds remarkably well within currency unions. Outside them, substantial differences persist, and most reflect prices set when goods are first introduced.
Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 60, No. 2, May 2013
Online supermarket prices reproduce the level and main dynamics of official inflation in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela. In Argentina, however, online inflation was nearly three times higher than the official estimate.
May 2016
This paper provides a consumer price index that links official CPI data from 1943–2007 to an online price index beginning in 2007, filling the gap created when Argentina’s official CPI became discredited and was later discontinued.
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2016
Households exposed to potentially biased official inflation statistics do not simply ignore or accept them. Evidence from natural and survey experiments points to sophisticated Bayesian learning and an asymmetric response when inflation signals rise rather than fall.
IMF Economic Review, Vol. 63, No. 2, September 2015
After Latvia joined the euro, price dispersion with euro-area countries collapsed rapidly for thousands of Zara products. The share of nearly identical Latvia–Germany prices rose from 6 to 89 percent and the median price difference fell to zero.
International Journal of Finance & Economics, Vol. 21, No. 1, April 2015
A new methodology based on binned-quantile regressions shows that common estimates of city-border effects are affected by selection bias. Applied to supermarket prices in Uruguay, the estimated city-border effect disappears in upper quantiles.
Review of Income and Wealth, Vol. 60, 2014
Following the 2010 Chile earthquake and 2011 Japan earthquake, product availability fell sharply and recovered slowly while prices remained stable for months—even for goods experiencing severe shortages.
NBER Working Paper 16760, March 2012
Price-change distributions from 36 supermarkets in 22 countries reject unimodality in most retailers. Category-level heterogeneity explains about half of the rejections, and simulations support a combination of time- and state-dependent pricing behavior.