This paper examines household consumption smoothing via variation in time spent shopping over the business cycle. Using scanner data on grocery purchases, we document how households lower the prices that they pay during downturns by increasing their coupon usage, sale purchasing, buying larger...

We document a change in household shopping behavior during the Great Recession. Households purchased more on sale, larger sizes and generic products, increased coupon usage, and shopping at discount stores. We estimate that the returns to these shopping activities declined during the recession...

Empirically studying dynamic competition in oligopoly markets requires dealing with large states spaces and tackling difficult computational problems, while handling heterogeneity and multiple equilibria. In this paper, we discuss some of the ways recent work in Industrial Organization has dealt...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy on the expenditure of households of different ages using micro data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey. I find that contractionary monetary policy shocks reduce the expenditure of young households by significantly more than older...

We study the nature of peer effects in the market for new cell phones. Our analysis builds on de-identified data from Facebook that combine information on social networks with information on users’ cell phone models. To identify peer effects, we use variation in friends’ new phone...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy on the expenditure of households of different ages using micro data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey. I find that contractionary monetary policy shocks reduce the expenditure of young households by significantly more than older...

We introduce a new measure of social connectedness between U.S. county-pairs, as well as between U.S. counties and foreign countries. Our measure, which we call the "Social Connectedness Index" (SCI), is based on the number of friendship links on Facebook, the world's largest online social...

This paper assesses the effects of demographic changes on the transmission of monetary policy to consumption. First, I provide empirical estimates of age-specific consumption elasticities to interest rate shocks. The consumption of the young is significantly more responsive than the national...