The Effects of General Inflation and Idiosyncratic Cost Shocks on Within-Commodity Price Dispersion: Evidence from Microdata
利用美国制造业普查的工厂级产品数据，研究通胀和成本冲击如何影响同一商品内部的价格离散程度，发现投入成本上升越快，价格离散越大。
This study investigates the dispersion of price levels within highly disaggregated markets by examining plant-level product records from the U.S. Census of Manufactures. The paper estimates the effects of inflation on price dispersion through cross-sectional variation in the drift rate of average input costs within a market, arguing that, in several models that relate inflation to price dispersion, the effects of cost increases on dispersion is similar to the effects of general inflation. We also disentangle the effects of aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks on price dispersion. In general, we find that the higher the drift rate of input costs of a given commodity, the larger the amount of price dispersion. The standard deviation of idiosyncratic shocks also is positively correlated with the degree of price dispersion. © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology