A large literature has documented a significant increase in the difference between the wage of college graduates and high school graduates over the past 30 years. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have experienced relatively larger increases in cost of living, because they have...

This paper studies how prices comove across products, firms and locations to gauge the relative importance of retailer versus manufacturer-level shocks in determining prices. I make use of a large panel data set on prices for a cross-section of retailers in the U.S. I analyze prices at the...

This paper provides a retrospective on the 1996 Boskin Commission Report, Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living, and its famous estimate that the CPI in 1995-96 was upward biased by 1.1 percent per year. The paper summarizes the report's methods, findings, and recommendations, and...

Border prices of traded goods are highly sensitive to exchange rates, but the CPI, and the retail prices of these goods, are more stable. Our paper decomposes the sources of this stability for twenty-one OECD countries, focusing on the important roles of distribution margins and imported inputs...

In this paper, we reevaluate the evidence of seasonality in prices which we find to be substantially greater than previous research has indicated. That is, seasonal price movements have become more prominent in the relatively stable inflation environment that has prevailed since 1982. One main...

We assess the importance of nominal rigidities using a new weekly scanner data set. We find that nominal rigidities are important but do not take the form of sticky prices. Instead, they take the form of inertia in reference prices and costs, defined as the most common prices and costs within a...

Inflation dynamics have been difficult to explain over the last decade. This paper explores if a more comprehensive treatment of globalization can help. CPI inflation has become more synchronized around the world since the 2008 crisis, but core and wage inflation have become less synchronized....

This paper shows that the products and prices offered in markets are correlated with local income-specific tastes. To quantify the welfare impact of this variation, I calculate local price indexes micro-founded by a model of non-homothetic demand over thousands of grocery products. These indexes...

Two strands of the literature suggest that PPI inflation, rather than CPI inflation, should be the targeting variable in a monetary policy rule. The distinction between these two rules would only be important if the two inflation indices do not co-move strongly. The first contribution of this...

The prescription drug component of the Consumer Price Index (CPI measures recent and past drug price changes, and provides the basis for projecting future price trends and health care expenditures. However, there are concerns about the adequacy of the price data because of recent changes in the...