Search Results
How Tariffs Are Affecting Prices in 2025
A model suggests that although tariffs have been only partially passed through to consumers, they already have exerted measurable pressure on prices.
Working Paper
Firm Size, Heterogeneous Strategic Complementarities, and Real Rigidity
Recent research indicates substantial differences in price-setting behavior between small and large firms, as only large firms exhibit strategic complementarities in price setting. Using firm survey data, we present new evidence that the cost-price pass-through decreases with firm size. To examine the implications for inflation dynamics, we develop a DSGE model that features heterogeneous complementarities across firm size. While standard DSGE models with homogeneous firms generate real rigidity in relative prices, there is little such rigidity in our model. Heterogeneity in strategic ...
Discussion Paper
Are Businesses Absorbing the Tariffs or Passing Them On to Their Customers?
U.S. import tariffs increased to historically high rates in recent months, raising the costs of many imported inputs businesses use. Businesses subject to these higher costs have been faced with difficult and complex decisions about whether to absorb the tariffs through lower profits, raise their prices to recover the higher costs, or some combination of both. These decisions are influenced by the degree of competition in the marketplace, potential customer reactions, and the ability to maintain profit margins, among other factors. Our May survey of businesses in the New York–Northern New ...
Working Paper
Incomplete Pass-Through in Mortgage Markets
This paper studies the May 2023 change in the conforming mortgage upfront guarantee fee schedule. Consistent with incomplete pass-through, lenders raise rejection rates and sell fewer loans to the GSEs when fees rise. For small-dollar mortgages (SDMs), pass-through is near zero and rejection rates are more sensitive to fee increases. This implies that the overall incomplete pass-through is partly driven by liquidity-constrained borrowers and that the inequality in mortgage access via higher rejection rates on SDMs is partly driven by lenders’ inability to pass costs onto SDM borrowers. ...
Working Paper
Firm Size, Heterogeneous Strategic Complementarities, and Real Rigidity
Recent research finds that only large firms exhibit strategic complementarities in price setting. Using firm survey data, we show that cost pass-through decreases significantly with firm size. To examine the implications for inflation dynamics, we develop a DSGE model that features heterogeneous complementarities across firm size. While standard DSGE models with homogeneous firms generate real rigidity in relative prices, such rigidity is much weaker in our model. Large firms that exhibit complementarities align their prices with those of small firms that more fully pass through costs. Our ...
Working Paper
The Price of Delay: Supply Chain Disruptions and Pricing Dynamics
We study the role of supply chain disruptions in shaping consumer prices, focusing on both firms' own import shocks and strategic responses to competitors' disruptions. Using a newly constructed microlevel dataset that links transaction-level US import data from bills of lading with high-frequency consumer prices and sales from a consumer panel, we develop a novel approach to estimate the price effects of cost shocks and product availability. Motivated by a model of delivery delays, cost shocks, and firm pricing, we implement a shift-share identification strategy based on delivery shortfalls, ...
Discussion Paper
More Tariff Pass‑Through Is in the Pipeline
The past year brought dramatic changes to U.S. trade policy, including sweeping new tariffs, as well as a Supreme Court decision that further reshaped the tariff landscape. Many businesses saw their costs increase significantly and faced complex decisions about whether to absorb the tariffs through lower profit margins, raise their prices to recover the higher costs, or some combination of the two. Last year, we found that most businesses had passed on at least some of these higher costs to their customers through higher prices. Now, over a year later, have businesses finished adjusting ...
Tariff Effects on Inflation Stabilize in Recent Months
The upward pressure that tariffs exert on U.S. inflation appears to have moderated in the first half of 2026, according to new estimates of effective tariffs and pass-through.
Working Paper
Understanding Changes in Exchange Rate Pass-Through
Recent research suggests that there has been a decline in the extent to which firms "pass through" changes in exchange rates to prices. Beyond providing further evidence in support of this claim, this paper proposes an explanation for the phenomenon. It then presents empirical evidence of a structural break during the 1990s in the relationship between the real exchange rate and CPI inflation for a set of 14 OECD countries. It is suggested that the recent reduction in the real exchange rate pass-through can be attributed in part to the low-inflation environment of the 1990s.
Working Paper
The Incidence of Fuel-Price Shocks and Tax Holidays: Evidence from the 2026 Oil Shock
We measure the distributional incidence of U.S. motor-fuel tax holidays using transaction records from ∼13,200 gasoline stations linked to neighborhood income. The 2026 Iran War raised gasoline expenditure shares 2.9 times more in the lowest- than highest-income census tracts. Pre-shock exposure accounts for 89% of the gap while the residual heterogeneity widens rather than offsets it. State-level tax holiday lowered retail prices but offset the same fraction (28%) of the per-gallon burden across quintiles. A counterfactual federal holiday preserves this incidence. Per-gallon relief is ...