We exploit detailed product- and firm-level data for the consumer goods industry and we document that the sales of individual products decline at a steady pace throughout most of their life cycles. This pattern is common across heterogenous types of products and is mostly due to declines in...

We construct income-specific price indexes for the period from 2004 to 2016. We find substantial differences across income groups that arise during the Great Recession. The difference in annual inflation between the lowest quartile of the income distribution and the highest quartile was 0.22...

The incidence of COVID-19 has systematically decreased households’ use of cash as means of payment as well as the average size and frequency of cash withdrawals. We argue that the structure of Baumol-Tobin type inventory theoretical models and their extensions can be used to separate the...

Firms are born small, grow, and die. We investigate an explanation for this process based on frictions in the accumulation of customers, across and within markets segmented by geography. We use matched retail scanner and TV advertising data on consumer food to show that entrants grow both by...

This paper studies the potential of a cryptocurrency to become a medium of exchange. We use evidence from a natural experiment: In September 2021, El Salvador became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender, and all economic agents were required to accept bitcoin for all...

This paper studies the potential of a cryptocurrency to become a medium of exchange. We use evidence from a natural experiment: In September 2021, El Salvador became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender, and all economic agents were required to accept bitcoin for all...