I present and solve the problem of a producer who faces costs of acquiring, absorbing, and processing information. I establish a series of theoretical results describing the producer's behavior. First, I find the conditions under which she prefers to set a plan for the price she charges, or...

This paper shows that conventional measures of cost-of-living inflation, based on static models of consumption, suffer from two problems. The first is an intertemporal substitution bias, as these measures neglect the ability of consumers to borrow and lend in response to price changes. The...

This paper uses a dynamic factor model for the quarterly changes in consumption goods' prices to separate them into three independent components: idiosyncratic relative-price changes, a low-dimensional index of aggregate relative-price changes, and an index of equiproportional changes in all...

We propose and implement a method that provides quantitative estimates of the extent to which higher- than-expected inflation can lower the real value of outstanding government debt. Looking forward, we derive a formula for the debt burden that relies on detailed information about debt maturity...