This paper investigates the link between product quality and price setting for central processing units (CPUs). Using thousands of price quotes from a popular price-comparison website, we find that market fundamentals, such as the number of sellers, median price, share of convenient prices and...

We use a repeated large-scale survey of households in the Nielsen Homescan panel to characterize how labor markets are being affected by the covid-19 pandemic. We document several facts. First, job loss has been significantly larger than implied by new unemployment claims: we estimate 20 million...

We study the cyclical properties of sales, regular price changes and average prices paid by consumers ("effective" prices) in a dataset containing prices and quantities sold for numerous retailers across a variety of U.S. metropolitan areas. Both the frequency and size of sales fall when local...

We study the effects and historical contribution of monetary policy shocks to consumption and income inequality in the United States since 1980. Contractionary monetary policy actions systematically increase inequality in labor earnings, total income, consumption and total expenditures....

We document a decline in the frequency of shopping trips in the U.S. since 1980 and consider its implications for the measurement of consumption inequality. A decline in shopping frequency as households stock up on storable goods (i.e. inventory behavior) will lead to a rise in expenditure...

We document basic facts about prices in online markets in the U.S. and Canada, a rapidly growing segment of the retail sector. Relative to prices in regular stores, prices in online markets are more flexible as well as exhibit stronger pass-through (60-75 percent) and faster convergence...

We construct a model of revolution and transition to democracy under individualistic and collectivist cultures. The main result is that, despite facing potentially larger collective action problems, countries with an individualistic culture are more likely to end up adopting democracy earlier...

Using a unique dataset of daily U.S. and U.K. price listings and the associated number of clicks for precisely defined goods from a major shopping platform, we shed new light on how prices are set in online markets, which have a number of special properties such as low search costs, low costs of...

The persistence of U.S. unemployment has risen with each of the last three recessions, raising the specter that future U.S. recessions might look more like the Eurosclerosis experience of the 1980s than traditional V-shaped recoveries of the past. In this paper, we revisit possible explanations...