Scraped Data and Sticky Prices / Alberto Cavallo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cavallo, Alberto.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21490.

NBER working paper series no. w21490

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

This paper introduces Scraped Data as a new source of micro-price information to measure price stickiness. Scraped data, collected from online retailers, have no time averaging or imputed prices that can affect pricing statistics in traditional sources of micro-price data. Using daily prices of 80 thousand products collected in five countries with varying degrees of inflation, including the US, I find that relative to previous findings in the literature, scraped online prices tend to be stickier, with fewer price changes close to zero percent, and with hump-shaped hazard functions that initially increase over time. I show that the sampling characteristics of the data, which minimize measurement biases, explain most of the differences with the literature. Using the cross-section of countries, I also show that only the relative frequency of price increases over decreases correlates with inflation.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2015.