We characterize the dispersion of grocery prices in France based on a large original data set of prices in more than 1500 supermarkets. On average across products, the 90th percentile of relative prices is 17 percentage points higher than the 10th and the mean absolute deviation from quarterly...

We provide an explanation of how inflation of the price of housing services is measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and describe alternative approaches. We then describe the contribution of inflation of the price of housing services to inflation in the consumer price index during the Great...

This paper studies how prices comove across products, firms and locations to gauge the relative importance of retailer versus manufacturer-level shocks in determining prices. I make use of a large panel data set on prices for a cross-section of retailers in the U.S. I analyze prices at the...

Measuring and comparing the levels of household welfare and poverty in a country require cost-of-living differences across regions to be properly adjusted. In measuring the spatial cost of living, the recent literature underscores the importance of detailed product quality information in the...

Using detailed firm-level transactions data for UK imports, we find that invoicing in a vehicle currency is pervasive, with more than half of transactions in our sample invoiced in neither sterling nor the exporter’s currency. We then study the relationship between invoicing currency...

Are survey-based forecasts unbeatable? They are not. This paper introduces online price indices to forecast the Consumer Price Index. We find that online price indices anticipate changes in official inflation trends more than one month in advance. Our baseline one-month and two-month-ahead...

We document the presence of both small and large price changes in individual price records from the CPI in France and the US. After correcting for measurement error and cross-section heterogeneity, the size-distribution of price changes has a positive excess kurtosis. We propose an analytical...

We document the presence of both small and large price changes in individual price records from the CPI in France and the US. After correcting for measurement error and cross-section heterogeneity, the size-distribution of price changes has a positive excess kurtosis. We propose an analytical...

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...