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...

This paper studies how prices comove across products, firms and locations to gauge the relative importance of retailer versus manufacturer-level shocks in determining prices. I make use of a large panel data set on prices for a cross-section of retailers in the U.S. I analyze prices at the...

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...

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 study the macroeconomic effects of unemployment insurance (UI) benefit extensions in the United States at short and long durations. To do this, we develop a new state level dataset on trigger variables for UI extensions and a "UI benefit calculator" based on detailed legislative and...

In standard models, economic activity fluctuates symmetrically around a "natural rate" and stabilization policies can dampen these fluctuations but do not affect the average level of activity. An alternative view--labeled the "plucking model" by Milton Friedman--is that economic fluctuations are...

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 past half-century, the growth rate of female employment slowed. We ask whether this slowdown in female employment caused the...

Recent empirical work uses variation across cities or regions to identify the effects of economic shocks of interest to macroeconomists. The interpretation of such estimates is complicated by the fact that they reflect both partial equilibrium and local general equilibrium effects of the shocks....