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The Cyclicality of Sales, Regular and Effective Prices: Comment

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Abstract

Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Hong (2015) argue that the CPI underestimates the deceleration in consumer prices during economic downturns because the index fails to account for the reallocation of consumer spending from high- to low-price stores. We show that these authors' measures of inflation with and without store switching suffer from several methodological deficiencies, including an excessive truncation of price adjustments and the lack of a treatment for missing observations. When we address these deficiencies, the authors' key regression results no longer suggest that greater store switching during downturns is a statistically or economically significant phenomenon.

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  • Etienne Gagnon & J. David López-Salido & Jason A. Sockin, 2015. "The Cyclicality of Sales, Regular and Effective Prices: Comment," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2015-52, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2015-52
    DOI: 10.17016/FEDS.2015.052
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    9. Etienne Gagnon & Benjamin R. Mandel & Robert J. Vigfusson, 2014. "Missing Import Price Changes and Low Exchange Rate Pass-Through," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 6(2), pages 156-206, April.
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    Cited by:

    1. Erwan Gautier, Hervé Le Bihan, 2018. "Shocks vs Menu Costs: Patterns of Price Rigidity in an Estimated Multi-Sector Menu-Cost Model," Working papers 682, Banque de France.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Outlet substitution bias; effective prices; inflation measurement;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles

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