Previous research has used survey and diary data to carefully document that Food Stamp recipients decrease their expenditures and consumption of food throughout the benefit month, the beginning of which is defined by the date on which benefits are distributed. The reliance on survey and diary...

We show that personal experiences of economic shocks can "scar'" consumer behavior in the long run. We first illustrate the effects of experience-based learning in a simple stochastic life-cycle consumption model with time-varying financial constraints. We then use data from the Panel Study of...

We study the effect on nutrition of an exogenous increase in food grain subsidy in rural India resulting from a program targeting the poor. Our analysis suggests that increase in income resulting from the food price subsidy changed consumption patterns in favor of the subsidized grains and...

This paper investigates changes in cultural consumption patterns for a low concentration industry: wine and beer. Using data on 38 countries from 1963-2000, there is clear convergence in the consumption of wine relative to beer between 1963 and 2000. Convergence occurs even more quickly within...

A key concern about counterfeits and weak intellectual property protection is that they may hamper innovation by displacing legitimate sales. This paper combines a natural policy experiment with randomized lab experiments to estimate the heterogeneous impacts of counterfeiting on the sales and...

A substantial part of international differences in prices of individual products, both goods and services, can be explained by differences in per capita income, wage compression, or low wage dispersion among low-wage workers, and short-term exchange rate fluctuations. Higher per capita income is...

We discuss prospects for innovation in consumer payment instruments. We discuss recent research into consumer payments and what can be learned about consumer behavior towards new payment options. We consider three new innovations in payments: mobile payments, faster payments and digital...

We study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Euro Area inflation and how it compares to the experiences of other countries, such as the United States, over the two-year period 2020-21. Our model-based calibration exercises deliver four key results: 1) Compositional effects - the switch from...

Emeryville, CA's Fair Workweek Ordinance (FWO) aimed to reduce service workers' schedule unpredictability by requiring large retail and food service employers to provide advanced notice of schedules and to compensate workers for last-minute schedule changes. From a 1-in-6 sample of Emeryville...