Search Results
Showing results 1 to 2 of approximately 2.
(refine search)
Working Paper
In Search of a Risk-free Asset
To attract retail time deposits, over 7,000 FDIC insured U.S. commercial banks publicly post their yield offers. I document an economically sizable and highly pro-cyclical cross-sectional dispersion in these yield offers during the period 1997 - 2011. Banks adjusted their yields rigidly and asymmetrically with median duration of 7 weeks in response to increasing or constant Fed Funds rate target regimes and 3 weeks during regimes of decreasing Fed Fund rate target. I investigate to what extent information (search) costs on the part of the investors in this market can explain the observed ...
Working Paper
Inflation, Price Dispersion, and Welfare: The Role of Consumer Search
In standard macroeconomic models, the costs of inflation are tightly linked to the price dispersion of identical goods. Therefore, understanding how price dispersion empirically relates to inflation is crucial for welfare analysis. In this paper, I study the relationship between steady-state inflation and price dispersion for a cross section of U.S. retail products using scanner data. By comparing prices of items with the same barcode, my measure of relative price dispersion controls for product heterogeneity, overcoming an important challenge in the literature. I document a new fact: price ...