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Journal Article
The Big Mac: a global-to-local look at pricing
The global, national, regional and local factors that shape price-setting behavior are complex, even for a relatively simple product that's neither easily tradable nor wholly nontradable.
Discussion Paper
Measuring core inflation: notes from a 2007 Dallas Fed conference
In May 2007, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas hosted a conference, organized with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, titled "Price Measurement for Monetary Policy." The conference broadly focused on two issues - the measurement of core inflation and the measurement of inflation expectations. This paper summarizes the conference papers on core inflation.
Speech
Improving survey measures of inflation expectations
Remarks at Forecasters Club of New York, New York City.>
Working Paper
Estimating the border effect: some new evidence
To what extent do national borders and national currencies impose costs that segment markets across countries? To answer this question the authors use a dataset with product-level retail prices and wholesale costs for a large grocery chain with stores in the United States and Canada. They develop a model of pricing by location and employ a regression discontinuity approach to estimate and interpret the border effect. They report three main facts: One, the median absolute retail price and wholesale cost discontinuities between adjacent stores on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border are as ...
Working Paper
CONDI: a cost-of-nominal-distortions index
We construct a price index with weights on the prices of different PCE goods chosen to minimize the welfare costs of nominal distortions: a cost-of-nominal-distortions index (CONDI). We compute these weights in a multisector New Keynesian model with time-dependent price setting, calibrated using U.S. data on the dispersion of price stickiness and labor shares across sectors. We find that the CONDI weights mostly depend on price stickiness and are less affected by the dispersion in labor shares. Moreover, CONDI stabilization leads to negligible welfare losses compared to the optimal policy and ...
Speech
Introductory remarks to the Price Measurement for Monetary Policy Conference
Remarks given to a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and Cleveland,> Dallas, Texas, May 24, 2007 ; "One of our main criticisms here at the Dallas Fed of much of the core inflation literature is that it lacks theoretical coherence. It reminds me of the time-honored saying that an economist is someone who sees something work in practice and then wonders if it can work in theory."
Discussion Paper
Excluding items from personal consumption expenditures inflation
Core inflation measures constructed by excluding particularly volatile items from the price index have a long history. The most common such measures are indexes excluding the prices of food and energy items. This paper attempts to shed some statistical light on the impact of excluding certain items from the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index. In particular, I am interested in the trade-off between reducing shortrun volatility (relative to the volatility of the headline index) and possibly distorting the measurement of inflation over longer horizons. Some of the questions this ...
Journal Article
Solid performance marked by district publicly traded companies
Journal Article
Comparing apples and oranges
Tracking prices over time is easy when the object in question doesn't change much-say, an orange. But the process is difficult when there are frequent changes in the quality of the item-say, an Apple computer. Hedonics provides the solution.