We use a unique panel of retail prices spanning 123 cities in 79 countries from 1990 to 2005, to uncover six novel properties of long-run international price dispersion. First, at the PPP level, virtually all (91.6%) of price dispersion is attributed to service-sector wages, consistent with 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....

We examine the price and variety of products at the barcode level in cities within China and the United States. In both countries, there is a greater variety of products in larger cities. But in China, unlike the United States, the prices of products tend to be lower in larger cities. We...

This paper briefly reviews the literature on the evolution of approaches to living standards and then applies the methodology discussed for stature to the United States from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries. Part I of the paper emphasizes two major strands of the subject:...

This paper estimates a cost of living index for 39 states of the United States and the District of Columbia, as well as for 70 individual cities and towns, for the year 1890. It gives an overall index in addition to seven commodity subindices (food, clothing, housing, fuel and lighting,...

Inflation equals the product of two terms: an extensive margin (the fraction of items with price changes) and an intensive margin (the average size of those price changes). The variance of inflation over time can be decomposed into contributions from each margin. The extensive margin figures...

How much economic value did the diffusion of broadband create? We provide benchmark estimates for 1999 to 2006. We observe $39 billion of total revenue in Internet access in 2006, with broadband accounting for $28 billion of this total. Depending on the estimate, households generated $20 to $22...

The Covid-19 Pandemic has led to changes in consumer expenditure patterns that can introduce significant bias in the measurement of inflation. I use data collected from credit and debit transactions in the US to update the official basket weights and estimate the impact on the Consumer Price...

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...

There has been a significant correlation between United States inward foreign direct investment and the United States real exchange rate since the 1970s. Two alternative reasons for this relationship are that the real exchange rate affects the relative cost of labor and that the real exchange...