Despite an absence of causal evidence showing that limited access to healthy foods is to blame for unhealthful consumption, policies aimed at improving poor diets by improving access are ubiquitous. In this paper, we use novel data describing both the healthfulness of household food purchases...

Official price indexes, such as the CPI, are imperfect indicators of inflation calculated using ad hoc price formulae different from the theoretically well-founded inflation indexes favored by economists. This paper provides the first estimate of how accurately the CPI informs us about...

This paper uses detailed barcode data on purchase transactions by households in 49 U.S. cities to overcome a large number of problems that have plagued spatial price index measurement. We identify two important sources of bias. Heterogeneity bias arises from comparing different goods in...

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...