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- 2021
- Working Paper
What Can Stockouts Tell Us About Inflation? Evidence from Online Micro Data
By: Alberto Cavallo and Oleksiy Kryvtsov
We use a detailed micro dataset on product availability to construct a direct high-frequency measure of consumer product shortages during the 2020-2021 pandemic. We document a widespread multi-fold rise in shortages in nearly all sectors early in the pandemic. Over...
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- June 2021
- Case
Modern Endowment Management: Paula Volent and the Bowdoin Endowment
By: Luis M. Viceira, Emily R. McComb and Dean Xu
This case examines modern endowment investment management through the lens of a leadership transition between Chief Investment Officers (CIOs). In March 2021, Paula Volent is about to step down as the CIO of the endowment of Bowdoin College after twenty-one years, and...
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- May 2021
- Case
Colombia: An Economic Premium to Peace?
Keywords:
Productivity;
Productivity Growth;
Conflict;
Conflict Management;
Labor Force Participation;
Labor Market;
Competitiveness;
Dutch Disease;
Security;
Peace;
Informality;
Labor Laws;
Total Factor Productivity;
Labor Productivity;
Economics;
Development Economics;
Economic Growth;
Economy;
Macroeconomics;
Competitive Advantage;
Infrastructure;
Negotiation;
Inflation and Deflation;
Non-Renewable Energy;
National Security;
Government Administration;
Latin America;
Central America;
Colombia;
South America
- March 2021
- Article
Targeted Price Controls on Supermarket Products
By: Alberto Cavallo and Diego Aparicio
We study the impact of targeted price controls for supermarket products in Argentina from 2007 to 2015. Using web scraping, we collected daily prices for controlled and non-controlled goods and measured the differential effects on inflation, product availability, and...
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Keywords:
Prices;
Controls;
Price Dispersion;
Economics;
Price;
Cost Management;
Goods and Commodities;
Retail Industry;
Argentina
- October 2020
- Case
Surviving Venezuela's Hyperinflation: Automercados Plaza's
By: Alberto Cavallo, Mariana Cal and Carla Larangeira
Under the rule of presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela experienced one of the worst economic and political meltdowns in modern history, culminating with a massive hyperinflation. Remarkably, during this dramatic times Automercados Plaza's had grown to...
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- 2020
- Chapter
Reserve Accumulation, Sovereign Debt, and Exchange Rate Policy
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
In the past decade, foreign participation in local-currency bond markets in emerging countries increased dramatically. Additionally, emerging countries are increasingly deviating from inflation targeting regimes, managing their exchange rate and engaging in...
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- August 2020
- Supplement
Luckin Coffee (B): Revelations of Fraud
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
This case describes revelations of fraud at Luckin Coffee, beginning with an anonymous report in January 2020 and continuing with the company’s admission in April 2020 that it had inflated its revenues by 2.2 billion RMB ($310 million), almost half its reported...
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- August 2020
- Article
Macroeconomic Drivers of Bond and Equity Risks
By: John Y. Campbell, Carolin E. Pflueger and Luis M. Viceira
Our new model of consumption-based habit generates time-varying risk premia on bonds and stocks from loglinear, homoskedastic macroeconomic dynamics. Consumers' first-order condition for the real risk-free bond generates an exactly loglinear consumption Euler equation,...
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- June 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
Muddy Waters vs. eHealth: The Debate of a 'Lifetime'
By: Jonas Heese and Cristo Liautaud
In May 2020, an analyst was assessing eHealth’s performance. eHealth was an online / tele-sales broker of health insurance products. The stock had recently hit all-time highs, closing at a peak of $146 on March 4, 2020. But now, May 4, 2020, eHealth traded at $103. The...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Inflation with COVID Consumption Baskets
By: Alberto Cavallo
The COVID-19 Pandemic has led to changes in expenditure patterns that can introduce significant bias in the measurement of Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation. I use publicly-available data on credit and debit card transactions to update the official CPI weights and...
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- Working Paper
Rebates in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Evidence from Medicines Sold in Retail Pharmacies in the U.S.
By: Pragya Kakani, Michael Chernew and Amitabh Chandra
Rising list prices are often used to illustrate the burden of prescription drug spending, but payers routinely negotiate rebates from manufacturers that generate differences between list and net prices. List prices are easily available and affect patient cost-sharing,...
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- February 2020 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
Australia: Commodities, Competitiveness, Climate and China
By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Laura Alfaro
For the past few decades, Australia has dealt with the benefits and costs of repeated mining booms—inflation, a housing bubble, a current account deficit, and growing dependence on China. Between 1996 and 2007, however, Australia had most of these issues under control...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Internal Models, Make Believe Prices, and Bond Market Cornering
By: Ishita Sen and Varun Sharma
Exploiting position-level heterogeneity in regulatory incentives to misreport and novel data on regulators, we document that U.S. life insurers inflate the values of corporate bonds using internal models. We estimate an additional $9-$18 billion decline in regulatory...
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- November 2019
- Case
Floating the Exchange Rate: In Pursuit of the Chinese Dream
By: Laura Alfaro and Sarah Jeong
In the decades following 2005, China faced significant financial challenges. Inflation spiraled upwards and China’s economy stagnated in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. The country’s leaders took an interventionist approach to weather the storm, controlling...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Tariff Passthrough at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from U.S. Trade Policy
By: Alberto Cavallo, Gita Gopinath, Brent Neiman and Jenny Tang
We use micro data collected at the border and the store to characterize the price impact of recent US trade policy on importers, exporters, and consumers. At the border, import tariff passthrough is much higher than exchange rate passthrough. Chinese exporters did not...
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- September 2019
- Case
Accounting Fraud at Tesco Stores (A)
By: Jonas Heese, Suraj Srinivasan and Julia Kelley
This case describes the accounting fraud at Tesco Stores Limited (TSL), which was discovered by a senior accountant in TSL’s finance department. The accountant was concerned about TSL’s handling of commercial income, which, according to the accountant, overstated...
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- 2019
- Article
More Amazon Effects: Online Competition and Pricing Behaviors
By: Alberto Cavallo
I study how online competition, with its shrinking margins, algorithmic pricing technologies, and the transparency of the web, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers in the U.S. and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that in the past...
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- April 2019 (Revised April 2020)
- Case
Reaganomics: Impact and Legacy
By: Tom Nicholas, John Masko and Matthew G. Preble
During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and his administration instituted several far-reaching economic policies that had both near- and long-term impacts on such aspects of the U.S. economy as monetary policy, inflation, the tax structure, and the role of...
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- July 2018 (Revised July 2018)
- Teaching Note
Argentina Power—Don’t Cry for Me Argentina
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Sayiddah Fatima McCree
Teaching Note for HBS No. 218-041. This case concerns a complex potential energy infrastructure investment in Argentina by a global conglomerate shortly after Mauricio Macri (“Macri”) became President of Argentina in 2015. The central issues are (i) why was a country...
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- June 2018
- Case
Japan: Deficits, Deflation and Debt
By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Haviland Sheldahl-Thomason
In April 2018, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was again in Washington to petition Donald Trump. After years of rapid, export-led growth, Japan had slumped into recession in 1991 and never really recovered. For the past 27 years, its economy has grown at 1.1% annually,...
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