Dynamics of the U.S. price distribution
We use microdata underlying U.S. consumer, producer and import price indices to document how the distribution of price changes evolves over time. Two striking features characterize pricing across all three datasets: (1) Frequency of price adjustments is countercyclical. (2) Frequency of price adjustments is correlated with variance. Conversely, other statistics that have received recent attention, like kurtosis, do not exhibit uniform patterns across our data sets. What implications do our empirical results have for monetary policy? Using a flexible accounting framework that collapses the high-dimensional distribution of price changes into a single measure of aggregate price flexibility, we show that flexibility is highly variable and countercyclical.
Duke Scholars
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- Economics
- 3803 Economic theory
- 3802 Econometrics
- 3801 Applied economics
- 14 Economics
Citation
Published In
DOI
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Economics
- 3803 Economic theory
- 3802 Econometrics
- 3801 Applied economics
- 14 Economics