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...

We empirically identify the effect of inflation on relative price distortions, using a novel identification approach derived from sticky price theories with time or state-dependent adjustment frictions. Our approach can be directly applied to micro price data, does not rely on estimating the gap...