In the microdata underlying US trade price indexes, 40 percent of products are replaced before a single price change is observed and 70 percent are replaced after two price changes or fewer. A price index that focuses on price changes for identical items may, therefore, miss an important...

We study a market with rationally inattentive consumers who are unsure of the terms of the offers made by firms, but can acquire information about the terms at a cost. In a symmetric equilibrium, the price set by firms is continuously increasing in the cost of information for consumers and...

Individuals must often choose among discrete actions with imperfect information about their payoffs. Before choosing, they have an opportunity to study the payoffs, but doing so is costly. This creates new choices such as the number of and types of questions to ask. We model these situations...

Existing empirical evidence suggests that real exchange rates exhibit hump-shaped dynamics. I show that this is a robust fact across nine large, developed economies. This fact can help explain why sticky price business cycle models have been unable to match the persistence of the real exchange...

We use rich historical data on military procurement to estimate the effects of government spending. We exploit regional variation in military build-ups to estimate an "open economy relative multiplier" of approximately 1.5. We develop a framework for interpreting this estimate and relating it to...