The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggregation of the CPI over 1990-2021, and...

There have been important methodological changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over time. These distort comparisons of inflation from different periods, which have become more prevalent as inflation has risen to 40-year highs. To better contextualize the current run-up in inflation, this...

We show how to recover the money-metric utility function, which converts income at one point in time into equivalent income at another point in time, using repeated cross-sectional household data. Our procedure allows unrestricted preferences, but requires that households' preferences be the...

A key reason for the existence of cities are the externalities created when people cluster together in close proximity. During Covid, such interactions came with health risks and people found other ways to interact. We document how cities changed during Covid and consider how the persistence of...

Income and home ownership both surged in the United States between 1940 and 1960. We use cross-place variation in changes in real income to assess the importance of income gains to the mid-century home ownership boom. OLS and IV estimates suggest that a large share of the overall increase in...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Prescription Drug Consumer Price Index (CPI-Rx) has been the focus of considerable controversy in recent years. The CPI-Rx limits its sampling frame to transactions in retail outpatient outlets, and excludes prescription pharmaceuticals dispensed in hospitals,...

Treasury bills and other near-money assets provide owners with liquidity service benefits that are reflected in prices in the form of a liquidity premium. I relate time variation in this liquidity premium to changes in the opportunity cost of money: The liquidity service benefits of near-money...

What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional...

Default options may provide a low-cost way of influencing behaviour without modifying incentives and constraining choices between alternatives. We study whether defaults can be used to increase insurance coverage against low-probability/high-impact risks, like floods, and whether past flood...