Amazon, Inc. (AMZN) Making Comparison Shopping Less Interesting These Days

According to Harvard Business School professor Alberto Cavallo, e-commerce is flatlining competition.

How Amazon is standardizing prices in US retail (Fr.)

Prices for groceries sold by Walmart vary less from one store to another when Amazon markets the same references.

Russell Lynch: Topsy-turvy world of rising interest rates and falling mortgage costs won’t last for ever

Amazon Effect: researcher claims web giant’s low prices keep inflation in check

Snap Fact: The link between online prices and inflation

Retailers adjusting prices more frequently and uniformly across locations should react faster to economic shocks, shows a recent study

How Amazon is killing comparison shopping

Competition between Amazon and traditional retailers is causing prices to become more uniform

Venezuela’s real inflation: a radio interview with Alberto Cavallo (Sp.)

A discussion on creating measures of the true inflation in Argentina and Venezuela

Measuring the Facts: Using Data to Tell the True Story of Inflation

MIT Sloan professor Roberto Rigobon and Harvard University professor Alberto Cavallo are the co-founders of the Billion Prices Project. The project collects prices — it has around 15 million prices today — provided by online retailers around the world. The public data is used to conduct research in macroeconomics and international economics. The professors say
-> Continue reading Measuring the Facts: Using Data to Tell the True Story of Inflation

The Rise Of E-Commerce In The Middle East

A new study argues that the growth of Amazon and other online retailers has kept inflation and prices low in the U.S. Will Israel and other Middle Eastern economies follow suit and allow e-commerce to take off?

Hutchins Roundup: Monetary policy response to labor market slack, online competition, and more

Online competition increases the frequency and uniformity of price changes at brick-and-mortar retailers.  

The ‘Amazon Effect’ Might Have An Impact Over The Dynamics Of Inflation

Alberto Cavallo, who works as an associate professor in the Harvard said that in the last 10 years, the competition in the online retailing has increased the price change frequency along with the uniform pricing degree across all the location.

Vital Signs: online retailing is changing our lives, whether we use it or not

Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City held its much anticipated annual central banking conference in Jackson Hole. This year’s topic “Changing Market Structures and Implications for Monetary Policy” garnered even more attention than usual.

Under ‘Amazon effect’ retailers could be more exposed to supply shocks

Harvard Business School found that the average duration for regular price changes fell to 3.65 months in 2014 to 2017 from 6.7 months in 2008 to 2010. It also investigated how prices at Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and Safeway vary across geographic locations. Harvard’s Alberto Cavallo concludes that the paper’s most important finding is that
-> Continue reading Under ‘Amazon effect’ retailers could be more exposed to supply shocks

Central banks hear warnings about trade, low trust

A discussion of competition and “superstar” firms at an exclusive economic policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, threw up a spirited defense of global trade, while central bankers were also warned of the low level of trust they have among the public.

How The Amazon Effect Affects Inflation, eCommerce

When thinking about the “Amazon Effect,” one may think invariably about retail, and the impact the eCommerce giant has on the sector — changing the very nature of how everything from books to clothes are bought and brought to end customers.

REUTERS NEWS SCHEDULE AT 10 a.m.

Harvard University professor Alberto Cavallo presents a paper at Kansas City Fed’s annual economic symposium

Amazon’s low pricing may be to blame for cause of inflation

The increase in popularity and decrease in prices from Amazon may be to blame for the rise in inflation over the last few years, reports Reuters.

The Other Amazon Effect: How Prices Have Become Less Insulated From Supply Shocks

Retailers’ prices have grown more uniform across locations, finds a paper presented at Jackson Hole

What e-commerce could mean for inflation in India

It is an area rich in data waiting to be mined–and the results could bring more clarity to India’s perennial inflation debates.

El arte de medir ‘por control remoto’ la inflación venezolana

Desbordado por las alzas, salidas de quicio, el gobierno de Maduro abandonó informes sobre precious.

Citizens not fooled by inflation statistics

For nine years, from 2007 to 2015, the Argentine government manipulated economic statistics in an attempt to fool the public into believing inflation was lower than it actually was. Citizens, however, didn’t buy it. In fact, they showed a remarkable aptitude for seeing through the claims.

The music we listen to can tell us a lot about the state of the economy

Organisations like the Bank and the Office for National Statistics can now draw on exponentially more data to produce their assessments of how the country is performing.

Mapping the economy in real time is almost ‘within our grasp’-Financial Times

The goal of mapping economic activity in real time, just as we do for weather or traffic, is “closer than ever to being within our grasp”, according to Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist.

Can’t Wait a Month for Inflation Data? Daily Gauge Shows Prices in Real Time

PriceStats, based on MIT’s Billion Prices Project, takes a daily temperature using online sales.

Can big data revolutionise policymaking by governments? – Financial Times

Mining digital information for accurate, up-to-date economic snapshots could help officials make quicker and better decisions

Economics in central banking: Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon – Billion Prices Project/PriceStats – Central Banking

Through a vast and ongoing data-collecting exercise, PriceStats has helped central banks overcome many of the drawbacks inherent in traditional inflation series.

As the Fed Deliberates, Amazon Is Making Its Job More Difficult -Wall Street Journal

The growth of e-commerce is well understood, tracking the smartphone’s ubiquity and a global supply chain that delivers consumer goods quickly and cheaply. Its impact on inflation—the so-called Amazon effect—is still being explored by economists.

An Economist Explains: How to Sort Facts From Fictions – New York Times

In public debates about economic policy, it can be hard to separate real insights from political posturing. But a few simple rules of thumb can help.

Policy analysis with big data -ECB Press

The recent financial crisis, and the euro area sovereign debt crisis that followed, were characterised by periods of increased heterogeneity, market fragmentation and sudden turns in economic activity. This often made it difficult for economic policymakers to understand and assess in real time the underlying forces driving economic behaviour. Both traditional statistical datasets and our
-> Continue reading Policy analysis with big data -ECB Press

Como a América Latina pode superar a inflação, segundo este economista do MIT.- Nexo

Alberto Cavallo ajudou a elaborar uma pesquisa de preços on-line e criou portal que mede as variações na Argentina e Venezuela .

En busca de la (hiper) inflación oculta- El Nacional

La inflación venezolana es de tal magnitud que da para experimentos. En el Instituto Tecnológico de Massachussets, en Estados Unidos, comenzaron uno hace tres meses: medir la inflación, esa que descose los bolsillos de los ciudadanos, con ayuda de los mismos que la padecen.

This is how much Americans would save if they did all their shopping online. – Marketwatch

The purchasing power of one dollar is worth more online, according to software company Adobe’s Digital Price Index, which looked at online and offline spending. If consumers had shifted all of their offline spending last year to online, that difference would have meant saving about $2.2 billion, it estimated.

Prices Keep Falling Faster Online. But for How Long? – Bloomberg Businessweek

New price data from Adobe Systems Inc., released today, show that online increased its price advantage vs. offline over the past two years. Logically speaking, though, the gap can’t keep widening forever. And there are some hints in the data that online’s edge is already—well, not going away, but approaching its limit.

Big data y la ciencia económica – América Economía

Big Data se define como la masividad de datos producidos por interacciones electrónicas a través de teléfonos celulares, transacciones online o redes sociales. Lleva el nombre de “big” por la enorme cantidad de datos que se generan a partir de las interacciones electrónicas entre personas.

[…]

El sitio que permite seguir la evolución de la inflación argentina día a día – Infobae.com

En épocas en las que la Argentina atravesaba el “apagón estadístico”, con cifras oficiales adulteradas sobre inflación, pobreza o PBI, el sitio InflaciónVeradera.com fue una referencia para determinar la evolución real de los precios de la economía.
[…]

Intermittent attention, poor memory shape public perceptions of inflation – MIT News

Do you know your country’s current inflation rate? What do you think it will be in the future? And how do you, personally, try to plan your finances accordingly?

Those are important questions for economists and policymakers, because central bankers generally assess future expectations of inflation when setting interest rates.
[…]

Tomorrow’s Prices – An interview with Alberto Cavallo on why consumers have such a hard time thinking about inflation – AEA Web

We see prices every day. Whether we are grocery shopping, going to the movies, or filling up our cars with gas, we notice the prices of what we buy and how they change over time.
[…]

Why the gold price can continue to rise from here

Adrian Ash, of BullionVault, writes exclusively for What Investment on the outlook for the gold price as inflation and interest rates rise.
Alongside Russia-US tensions and crisis-driven spikes in the oil price, suddenly inflation is back making headlines.
[…]

Britain’s inflation data needs to be dragged out of the stone age

Everyone knew something was wrong. Between 2007 and 2011, the Argentine government claimed inflation was running at an average of 8 per cent but the numbers did not tally with what households were experiencing.
[…]

UK prices rising faster after Brexit vote

Statistics imply that real wages may be falling by 0.6% annually – compared with the 0.9% growth rate indicated by official data.
Prices in the UK are now rising at an annual rate of more than 3% in the latest evidence of economic fallout from the EU referendum, according to figures seen by Sky News.
[…]

A billion prices can’t be wrong, by Tim Harford

In the dying days of 2015 came news to set any geek’s pulse racing: the declaration of a “statistical emergency” by Mauricio Macri, the new president of Argentina. Macri’s move enabled Jorge Todesca, head of the statistics bureau, to suspend publication of some basic economic data.
[…]

Prices mostly stay the same whether you shop in store or online

Online shopping is supposed to be a click away from bargains and cheap goods, but this is all a myth, says new research.
A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of 10 countries, including South Africa, has shown that most firms sell their products at the…
[…]

Fudged Numbers Won’t Make the U.S. Grow Faster

The Trump administration has some very optimistic economic targets. It should resist messing with the statistics.
The Soviet Union had a reputation for presenting fake economic statistics to the world, in order to avoid having its dysfunctional system look…
[…]

Online prices cheaper than in store? Not so fast

Standing in the checkout line at Walmart waiting to buy a TV or the latest gadget, one might ponder whether it’s cheaper to buy the same television from Walmart online.
Turns out, it’s probably not.
[…]

Online shopping offers hardly any price advantages

In an average of 72 percent of the cases, there is no price advantage to shop online instead of in the shop – or vice versa. This is the result of a recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after analyzing online and offline prices in ten countries.
[…]

Online and Offline Prices are similar

Alberto Cavallo, Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, explains how online and offline prices compare. Everyone has their own personal opinion, but Prof. Cavallo and his team wanted to collect data in a large number of countries to answer the question with objective evidence.
[…]

Online shopping offers hardly any price advantages