We document a new stylized fact for the life-cycle behavior of consumer prices: relative to a narrowly defined set of competing products, the price of individual products tends to fall over the product lifetime. This holds true for more than 90% of the expenditure items underlying the U.K....

We present a sticky-price model incorporating heterogeneous firms and systematic firm-level productivity trends. Aggregating the model in closed form, we show that it delivers radically different predictions for the optimal inflation rate than canonical sticky price models featuring homogenous...

This paper discusses the normative implications of the micro evidence on heterogeneity in price setting gathered by the Price-setting Microdata Analysis Network (PRISMA) for the level of inflation that central banks should target. The micro price data underlying the consumer price index are used...