One of the greatest challenges facing official statistics in the 21st century is the use of alternative sources of data about prices (scanned and scraped data) in the analysis of price dynamics, which also involves selecting the appropriate formula of the price index at the elementary group...

This paper examines the extent to which gains-from-trade predictions from commonly-used trade theories are consistent with observed household consumption decisions. Our approach is based on inference from household-level estimation of food Engel curves in the US and in a few other countries. For...

This paper studies the relative performance of alternative monetary policy rules in the presence of oil price shocks in a small open economy optimizing model. Our analysis shows that it is important to distinguish between alternative price indices (CPI, core CPI, and GDP deflator) when modeling...

This paper investigates the existence of market power and the sequentiality of games in the crude oil market. In particular, we examine whether Saudi Arabia acts as a Stackelberg leader or in a simultaneous-move framework, in a number of market power scenarios ranging from perfect competition to...

We study a class of symmetric, quasi-homothetic preferences that result in demands logarithmic in own prices when these have a negligible impact on aggregate price indices (as in monopolistic competition models). Thus marginal revenues are computationally friendly, and decreasing whenever...

This paper analyzes the transmission from global commodity to domestic food prices for a large set of countries. First, a theoretical model is developed to explain price transmission for different trade regimes. Drawing from the competitive storage model under rational expectations, it is shown...

Commodity prices and their secular trends are at the core of many different development theories, particularly relevant for the Latin American region, like the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis, the natural resource curse theory or the somehow malthusian scarcity prediction. In this article we review...

Der Preisindex für Wohnimmobilien (kurz: Häuserpreisindex) misst vierteljährlich die Preisentwicklung der in Deutschland von Privatpersonen erworbenen Ein- und Zweifamilienhäuser und Eigentumswohnungen. Als Teil eines Indikatorensets dient er unter anderem der Beurteilung der...

I report historical prices and estimate financial returns to investing in rare books. My sample consists of 25 fiction titles recommended by Clifton Fadiman in his 1960 Lifetime Reading Plan. Relying on prices realized at American and British auction houses between 1975 and 2018, I use hedonic...

Using a general equilibrium heterogeneous agent model featuring health production, we quantify the relative contribution of price distortions in the health market, TFP and other health risks in explaining cross-country differences in health expenditure (as a share of GDP) and health status....