Much research studies US inflation history with a trend-cycle model with unobserved components. A key feature of this model is that the trend may be viewed as the Fed’s evolving inflation target or long-horizon expected inflation. We provide a new way to measure the slowly evolving trend and...

We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion for 14 commodities from 1732 to 1860. The prices are reported for US cities and Swedish market towns, so we can compare international and intranational dispersion. Distance and commodity-specific fixed effects...