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...

This study aims at identifying guests' willingness to pay for characteristics of listings on Airbnb, putting a particular emphasis on trust-building information provided by the platform. In order to do so, a hedonic regression model is applied to an extensive dataset that was gathered in 2017...

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 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...

The correlation between persistent changes in the markup in one sector of an economy and the inflation rate is quantified in a 2-sector dynamic general equilibrium model. How this relationship is affected by monetary policy is also studied. We find that the correlation is in general positive...

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...

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....

Rare books of political economy are eminently collectable. Using historical prices, I employ hedonic regressions to estimate financial returns to collecting the works of ten eminent political economists and develop a price index for this corpus of collectables. For the observation period...