This paper estimates monthly pass-through ratios from import prices to consumer prices in real time. Conventional time series methods impose restrictions to generate exogenous shocks on exchange rates or import prices when estimating pass-through coefficients. Instead, a natural experiment based...

The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) is the primary measure of inflation in the euro area, and plays a central role in the policy deliberations of the European Central Bank (ECB). The ECB defines its Treaty mandate of price stability as "…a year-on-year increase in the Harmonised...

When labor-abundant nations grow, their exports increase more in labor-intensive sectors than in capital-intensive sectors. We utilize this sectoral difference in how exports are affected by growth to identify the causal effect of trade with low-income countries (LICs) on U.S. industry. Our...

Volatile and persistent real exchange rates are observed not only in aggregate series but also on the individual good level data. Kehoe and Midrigan (2007) recently showed that, under a standard assumption on nominal price stickiness, empirical frequencies of micro price adjustment cannot...

The broadest and most commonly used measure of the cost of living across U.S. cities is the American Chamber of Commerce Research Association (ACCRA) index. This index is used by business and government organizations and the media to rank living standards and real wages across U.S. cities. In...

We study a newly constructed panel data set of relative prices of a large number of consumer goods among 31 European countries. We find that there is a substantial and nondiminishing deviation from PPP at all levels of aggregation, even among euro zone members. However, real exchange rates are...

This paper reviews various approaches to the measurement of core inflation that have been proposed in recent years. The objective is to determine whether the European Central Bank (ECB) should pay special attention to one or other of these measures in assessing inflation developments in the euro...