Publications

Educators

February 2004 (Revised March 2010)
Case

Brazil 2003: Inflation Targeting and Debt Dynamics

By: Laura Alfaro, Rafael M. Di Tella and Ingrid Vogel

In October 2002, Brazilians elected a left-wing president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, for the first time in that country's history. As markets faltered in response, Lula sought to reaffirm his commitment to fiscal discipline, a floating exchange rate, and inflation... View Details

Keywords: Economy; Inflation and Deflation; Money; Borrowing and Debt; Policy; Emerging Markets; Brazil

Educators

Purchase

Article

Online and Official Price Indexes: Measuring Argentina's Inflation

By: Alberto Cavallo

Prices collected from online retailers can be used to construct daily price indexes that complement official statistics. This paper studies their ability to match official inflation estimates in five Latin American countries, with a focus on Argentina, where official... View Details

Keywords: Inflation; Online Price Index; Economics; Macroeconomics; Inflation and Deflation; Price; Latin America; Argentina

May 2004 (Revised July 2008)
Teaching Note

Brazil 2003: Inflation Targeting and Debt Dynamics (TN)

By: Laura Alfaro, Rafael M. Di Tella and Ingrid Vogel

Teaching Note to (9-704-028). View Details

Keywords: Inflation and Deflation; Borrowing and Debt; Brazil

Purchase

2023
Chapter

Inflation and Misallocation in New Keynesian Models

By: Alberto Cavallo, Francesco Lippi and Ken Miyahara

The New Keynesian framework implies that sluggish price adjustment results in a distorted allocation of resources. We use a simple model to quantify these unobservable distortions, using data that depict the price-setting behavior of firms, specifically the frequency... View Details

Keywords: Macroeconomics; Inflation and Deflation; Price; Analytics and Data Science; Cost

2023
Working Paper

Detecting Structural Breaks in Inflation Trends: A High-Frequency Approach

By: Alberto Cavallo and Gaston Garcia Zavaleta

We combine standard structural-break methods with high-frequency data to identify shifts in inflation trends. We use this approach to study the inflation dynamics of 25 countries from January 2022 to April 2023 and find evidence of a broad-based slowdown in about half... View Details

Keywords: Inflation and Deflation; Global Range; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Analysis; Price

2009
Working Paper

Altruistic Dynamic Pricing with Customer Regret

By: Julio J. Rotemberg

A model is considered where firms internalize the regret costs that consumers experience when they see an unexpected price change. Regret costs are assumed to be increasing in the size of price changes and this can explain why the size of price increases is less... View Details

Keywords: Inflation and Deflation; Price; Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Mathematical Methods

December 2010
Article

Altruistic Dynamic Pricing with Customer Regret

By: Julio J. Rotemberg

A model is considered where firms internalize the regret costs that consumers experience when they see an unexpected price change. Regret costs are assumed to be increasing in the size of price changes and this can explain why the size of price increases is less... View Details

Keywords: Cost; Price; Change; Inflation and Deflation; Cost Management; Customers; Practice; Announcements; Forecasting and Prediction

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,... View Details

Keywords: Consumption-based Habit Formation; Consumption Euler Equation; Time-varying Risk Premia; Inflation Dynamics; Bond-stock Correlation; Risk and Uncertainty; Bonds; Macroeconomics

Alberto Cavallo is the Thomas S. Murphy Professor of Business Administration 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, a... View Details

2005
Working Paper

Nominal versus Indexed Debt: A Quantitative Horse Race

By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk

The main arguments in favor of and against nominal and indexed debt are the incentive to default through inflation versus hedging against unforeseen shocks. We model and calibrate these arguments to assess their quantitative importance. We use a dynamic equilibrium... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Taxation; Risk and Uncertainty; Inflation and Deflation; System Shocks; Developing Countries and Economies; Mathematical Methods

Article

Om det meningslösa och farliga med monetär heroism [On the Futility and Hazards of Monetary Heroics]

By: Amar Bhide

The decentralized enterprise that sustains the dynamism of economies makes top-down monetary interventions, such as quantitative easing, that target aggregates such as overall inflation, futile. Moreover, economic stability and dynamism also require prudent,... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Monetary Policy; Decentralization; Quantitative Easing

Register to Read

December 2010
Article

Nominal versus Indexed Debt: A Quantitative Horse Race

By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk

The main arguments in favor of and against nominal and indexed debt are the incentive to default through inflation versus hedging against unforeseen shocks. We model and calibrate these arguments to assess their quantitative importance. We use a dynamic equilibrium... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Motivation and Incentives; Inflation and Deflation; System Shocks; Taxation; Risk and Uncertainty; Framework; Problems and Challenges; Interest Rates; Cost; Developing Countries and Economies; Service Operations

Research Summary

Nominal versus Indexed Debt: A Quantitative Horse Race (joint with Fabio Kanczuk)

By: Laura Alfaro

There are different arguments in favor and against nominal and indexed debt which broadly include the incentive to default through inflation versus hedging against unforeseen shocks. We model these arguments and calibrate the model to assess the quantitative importance... View Details

Forthcoming
Article

Trading Volume Manipulation and Competition Among Centralized Crypto Exchanges

By: Dan Amiran, Evgeny Lyandres and Daniel Rabetti

How competition affects manipulation by firms of information about important attributes of their products and how such information manipulation impacts firms’ short-term and long-term performance are open empirical questions. We use a setting that is especially... View Details

Keywords: Cryptocurrency; Financial Markets; Performance; Competition

Register to Read

How competition affects manipulation by firms of information about important attributes of their products and how such information manipulation impacts firms’ short-term and long-term performance are open empirical questions. We use a setting that is especially... View Details

11 Sep 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, September 11, 2018

and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that in the past ten years online competition has raised both the frequency of price changes and the degree of uniform pricing across locations. These changes make retail... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

07 Sep 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Optimal Value and Growth Tilts in Long-Horizon Portfolios

Keywords: by Jakub W. Jurek & Luis M. Viceira

24 Jun 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Don’t Just Survive—Thrive: Leading Innovation in Good Times and Bad

Keywords: by Lynda M. Applegate & J. Bruce Harreld

2025
Working Paper

Markups and Cost Pass-through Along the Supply Chain

By: Santiago Alvarez-Blaser, Alberto Cavallo, Alexander MacKay and Paolo Mengano

We study markups and pricing strategies along the supply chain. Our unique dataset combines detailed price and cost information from a large global manufacturer with matched retail prices collected online for the period July 2018 through June 2023. We show that total... View Details

Keywords: Markups; Pricing; Price; Supply Chain; Inflation and Deflation; Cost