Over the last three decades the supply of economic statistics has vastly improved. Unfortunately, statistics on regional price levels (sub-national purchasing power parities) have been exempt from this positive trend, even though they are indispensable for meaningful spatial comparisons of...

Current methodologies to calculate a consumer price index (CPI) with online prices have shown an abnormal downward trend. This paper introduces a new methodology that avoids this problem by effectively mitigating the effects of product turnover. The method mimics the decision-making process of...

The paper explores the extent to which products follow systematic pricing patterns over their life cycle and the impact this has on the measurement of inflation. Using a large US scanner data set on supermarket products and applying flexible regression methods, we find that on average prices...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

Uniform spatial pricing is a pricing policy by which a firm delivers its product to any customer at a fixed price, independent of the customer's location. For example, it is the method often, but not always used by mail-order and internet firms. Less well-recognized is that uniform pricing is...

Research shows that grocery stores reduce prices to compete with Walmart Supercenters. This study finds evidence that the competitive effects of two other big box retailers – Costco and Walmart-owned Sam's Club – are quite different. Using city-level panel grocery price data matched with a...

We develop a novel model of price-fee competition in bilateral oligopoly markets with non-expandable infrastructures and costly transportation. The model captures a variety of real market situations and it is the continuous quantity version of the assignment game with indivisible goods on a .xed...

We compile a new database of grocery prices in Argentina, with over 9 million observations per day. We find uniform pricing both within and across regions - i.e., product prices almost do not vary within stores of a chain. Uniform pricing implies that prices would not change with regional...