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This work has been mentioned in The New York Times, Bloomberg, Quartz, Financial Times, Financial Times II, Reuters, Washington Post, Folha de S Paolo, NPR, TIME, Bloomberg II
Alberto Cavallo is the Edgerley Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE) unit, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Technical Advisory Committee of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Professor Cavallo's research focuses on the behavior of prices and its implications for macroeconomic measurement and policies. His work is based on the use of daily data collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world. He co-founded The Billion Prices Project, an academic initiative at Harvard and MIT that pioneered the use of online data to conduct research on high-frequency price dynamics and inflation measurement. He also created Inflacion Verdadera to measure the real inflation rate in Argentina and Venezuela and co-founded two private companies: Dineromail, the first online-payments company in Latin America, and PriceStats, the leading private source of inflation and PPP statistics.
He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010, an MBA from MIT Sloan in 2005, and a B.S. from Universidad de San Andres in Argentina in 2000.
I study how online competition, with its algorithmic pricing technologies and the transparency of the Internet, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that online competition has raised both the frequency of price changes and the degree of uniform pricing across locations in the U.S. over the past 10 years. These changes make retail prices more sensitive to aggregate nationwide shocks, increasing the pass-through of both gas prices and nominal exchange rate fluctuations.
This work has been featured in The Economist, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, HBS Working Knowledge, and Bloomberg.
Online prices are increasingly used for measurement and research applications, yet little is known about their relation to prices in physical stores, where most retail transactions occur. I conduct the first large-scale comparison of prices simultaneously collected from the websites and physical stores of 56 large multi-channel retailers in 10 countries. I find that price levels are identical about 72 percent of the time. Price changes are not synchronized but have similar frequencies and average sizes. These results have implications for national statistical offices, researchers using online data, and anyone interested in the effect of the Internet on retail prices.
Alberto Cavallo is the Edgerley Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE) unit, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Technical Advisory Committee of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Professor Cavallo's research focuses on the behavior of prices and its implications for macroeconomic measurement and policies. His work is based on the use of daily data collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world. He co-founded The Billion Prices Project, an academic initiative at Harvard and MIT that pioneered the use of online data to conduct research on high-frequency price dynamics and inflation measurement. He also created Inflacion Verdadera to measure the real inflation rate in Argentina and Venezuela and co-founded two private companies: Dineromail, the first online-payments company in Latin America, and PriceStats, the leading private source of inflation and PPP statistics.
He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010, an MBA from MIT Sloan in 2005, and a B.S. from Universidad de San Andres in Argentina in 2000.
I study how online competition, with its algorithmic pricing technologies and the transparency of the Internet, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that online competition has raised both the frequency of price changes and the degree of uniform pricing across locations in the U.S. over the past 10 years. These changes make retail prices more sensitive to aggregate nationwide shocks, increasing the pass-through of both gas prices and nominal exchange rate fluctuations.
This work has been featured in The Economist, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, HBS Working Knowledge, and Bloomberg.
Online prices are increasingly used for measurement and research applications, yet little is known about their relation to prices in physical stores, where most retail transactions occur. I conduct the first large-scale comparison of prices simultaneously collected from the websites and physical stores of 56 large multi-channel retailers in 10 countries. I find that price levels are identical about 72 percent of the time. Price changes are not synchronized but have similar frequencies and average sizes. These results have implications for national statistical offices, researchers using online data, and anyone interested in the effect of the Internet on retail prices.
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25 Mar 2021
Bloomberg
Pandemic Shopping Habits Are Giving Inflation Experts a Headache
30 Oct 2020
TIME
The Pandemic Is Costing Americans More Money Than Official Numbers Suggest
21 Sep 2020
Folha de S. Paolo
Brasileiro é dos que mais sentem a 'inflação da Covid', aponta estudo
11 Sep 2020
NPR
More Groceries, Less Gas: The Pandemic Is Shaking Up The Cost Of Living
02 Sep 2020
New York Times
Inflation Is Higher Than the Numbers Say
13 Aug 2020
Washington Post
Inflation Is Actually a Lot Higher Than You Think
13 Jul 2020
Financial Times
Inflation: baskets of plenty
28 Jun 2020
Financial Times
Prices are rising faster than official figures suggest
19 Jun 2020
Financial Times
Inflation Is Higher Than the Official Numbers
19 Jun 2020
Reuters
Pandemic Prises Open Inflation Information Gap
17 Jun 2020
Quartz
Covid-19 is distorting inflation numbers around the world
22 May 2020
Bloomberg
In the Lockdown Economy, Old Measures of Inflation Get It Wrong
28 Apr 2020
Harvard Gazette
American economy on the bubble
05 Mar 2020
Economist
What one game show reveals about the American economy
17 Jan 2020
Washington Post
Trump’s China tariffs have not caused Americans to pay $1,000 more a year. Here’s
why.
12 Jan 2020
Wall Street Journal
Trade War With China Took Toll on U.S., but Not Big One
16 Oct 2019
New York Times
Trump’s China Deal Leaves the Global Economy as Uncertain as Ever
10 Oct 2019
Economist
Technology is making inflation statistics an unreliable guide to the economy
10 Sep 2019
BBC
Trump’s tariffs puts Apple’s golden goose at risk
12 Aug 2019
Forbes
Trump Still Doesn't Know Who Pays Tariffs
27 Jun 2019
Associated Press
Low online prices are great for shoppers. But they're killing small businesses
24 Apr 2019
HBS Working Knowledge
The 'Amazon Effect' Is Changing Online Price Competition—and the Fed Needs to Pay
Attention
18 Apr 2019
Economist
Mauricio Macri freezes prices
15 Nov 2018
Economist
Technology firms are both the friend and the foe of competition
12 Oct 2018
Bloomberg
The ‘Amazon Effect’ Can Drive Prices Up, Too
10 Oct 2018
Marketwatch
How Amazon is killing comparison shopping
24 Sep 2018
El País
El ‘efecto Amazon’ cambia la economía
30 Aug 2018
Economist
Central bankers grapple with the changing nature of competition
25 Aug 2018
Financial Times
Growth of online retail is changing inflation
25 Aug 2018
Wall Street Journal
The Other Amazon Effect: How Prices Have Become Less Insulated From Supply Shocks
25 Aug 2018
New York Times
Are Superstar Firms and Amazon Effects Reshaping the Economy?
25 Aug 2018
Bloomberg
`Amazon Effect' May Make Central Bank Job Harder
25 Aug 2018
Reuters
'Amazon effect' could have impact on inflation dynamics: paper
01 Feb 2018
Financial Times
Can big data revolutionise policymaking by governments?
26 Jan 2018
Financial Times
Investing in UK retailers: Bargains or basket cases?
24 Jan 2018
Central Banking
Economics in Central Banking Award 2018: BPP and PriceStats
11 Dec 2017
Wall Street Journal
As the Fed Deliberates, Amazon Is Making Its Job More Difficult
08 Nov 2017
Infobae
The democracy of data: how Venezuelans can stand up to government lies
31 Jul 2017
MIT News
Intermittent attention, poor memory shape public perceptions of inflation
21 Jul 2017
American Economic Association
Tomorrow's Prices
01 Jun 2017
Data Made to Matter
Don't Lie to Me Argentina
07 Mar 2017
Sky News
UK prices rising faster after Brexit vote
07 Feb 2017
Boston Globe
Online prices cheaper than in store? Not so fast
31 Jan 2017
MIT News
A fair price to pay?
28 Dec 2016
American Economic Association
Retail price reality check
15 Nov 2016
The Times
Britain’s inflation data needs to be dragged out of the stone age
13 May 2016
Financial Times
A billion prices can't be wrong
04 Apr 2016
Financial Times
Data Collection is the Ultimate Public Good
14 May 2015
Project Syndicate
An Economics to Fit the Facts
17 Mar 2015
Huffington Post
The Success of Monitoring the Economy With Big Data
13 Mar 2015
Wall Street Journal
The Billion Prices Project Thinks Inflation May Have Turned a Sharp Corner