We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion across 32 Swedish towns for 19 commodities from 1732 to 1914. The resulting large number of relative prices (502,689) allows precise estimation of distance and time effects, and their interaction. We find an...

We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion for 14 commodities from 1732 to 1860. The prices are reported for US cities and Swedish market towns, so we can compare international and intranational dispersion. Distance and commodity-specific fixed effects...

Much research studies US inflation history with a trend-cycle model with unobserved components. A key feature of this model is that the trend may be viewed as the Fed’s evolving inflation target or long-horizon expected inflation. We provide a new way to measure the slowly evolving trend and...

Interwar macroeconomic history is a natural place to look for evidence on the correlation between output growth and inflation or unexpected inflation. We apply time-series methods to measure unexpected inflation for more than twenty countries using both retail and wholesale prices. There is a...

We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion for 14 commodities from 1732 to 1860. The prices are reported for US cities and Swedish market towns, so we can compare international and intranational dispersion. Distance and commodity-specific fixed effects...

Phillips curves are central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. The hybrid new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) describes how past inflation, expected future inflation, and a measure of real aggregate demand drive the current inflation rate. This paper studies the...

What explains the widespread fear of deflation? This paper reviews the history of thought, economic history, and empirical evidence on deflation, with a view to answering this question. It also outlines informally the main effects of deflation in applied monetary models. The main finding is that...