Scraped Data and Sticky Prices

Cavallo, Alberto

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1711999

Cited by 61 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…within firms across products" (p. 1). Cavallo (2010) argues that "there is strong daily price synchronization within narrow categories" 8. The 16 product categories for which perfect synchronization dominates perfect staggering are: special bread, whole wheat bread, standard and king-size cigarettes, water charge, butane, propane, single room in an hospital, LPGA, Eurosuper RON95, Superplus RON98, construction game (Lego), school lunch, school boarding fees, public health insurance premium, and passport stamp.…”

Section: The Effect Of Aggregation On the Observed Degree Of Stagmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…as richer and more comprehensive data sets became available. Researchers gained access to data underlying the construction of the consumer price index (CPI) in many countries (Bils and Klenow 2004;Dhyne et al 2006), and to scanner and "scraped" online data (Cavallo 2010;Abe and Tonogi 2010;The Billion Prices Project). These empirical studies, summarized in Dhyne et al (2006), Álvarez et al (2006), Klenow and Malin (2011), and Nakamura and Steinsson (2013) provide a wealth of information on the frequency of price changes, its differences across price types and heterogeneity across firms and sectors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recently, Midrigan (2011) reports prices in a U.S. grocery chain are more synchronized within than across stores. Cavallo (2010) finds, using very frequent (daily) supermarket data from four Latin-American countries, that price changes of similar goods within store are synchronized. Chaumont et al (2011) report that synchronization of price changes across stores varies greatly between grocery chains in Chile.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Aggregation and the Staggering of Price Changes

Dhyne

Konieczny

2014

Economic Inquiry

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Temporal distribution of individual price changes is of crucial importance for business cycle theory and for the microfoundations of price adjustment. While it is routinely assumed that price changes are staggered over time, both theory and evidence are ambiguous. We use a large Belgian data set to analyze whether price changes are staggered or synchronized. We find that the more aggregated are the data, the closer is the distribution to perfect staggering. The results hold both for aggregation across products, and across locations. They are consistent with an economy in which idiosyncratic shocks are the main cause of price changes. (JEL E30, E31, D40)

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Section: The Effect Of Aggregation On the Observed Degree Of Stagmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Aggregation and the Staggering of Price Changes

Dhyne

Konieczny

2014

Economic Inquiry

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“…In other countries where government survey measures may be less reliable or nonexistent, the automatically gathered online data already may be preferable. Cavallo (2012) uses the data underlying the BPP index to document patterns of price changes in the same way that researchers have used the data underlying the CPI (Klenow and Kryvtsov 2008).…”

Section: B New Measures Of Private Sector Economic Activitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Data Revolution and Economic Analysis

Einav¹,

Levin²

2014

Innovation Policy and the Economy

161

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Executive SummaryMany believe that "big data" will transform business, government, and other aspects of the economy. In this article we discuss how new data may impact economic policy and economic research. Large-scale administrative data sets and proprietary private sector data can greatly improve the way we measure, track, and describe economic activity. They can also enable novel research designs that allow researchers to trace the consequences of different events or policies. We outline some of the challenges in accessing and making use of these data. We also consider whether the big data predictive modeling tools that have emerged in statistics and computer science may prove useful in economics.There was fi ve exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing.-Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, 2010 1

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“…With respect to measurement, we use the webscrapped price data. Web-scraping is an innovative technique used to analyse the price dynamics, for example, by Cavallo (2015). The novelty of our approach lies in using data from price comparison services instead of working with great number of individual sites which often use incompatible web technologies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Drives Price Dispersion in the European E-commerce Industry?

Gyódi

Sobolewski

Ziembiński

2017

Central European Economic Journal

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An important aspect of economic integration of the European Union is price convergence on digital single market. In this study, we propose a novel way to measure price dispersion in the e-commerce industry, using a custom made web-scraping tool. We target all the major price comparisons sites in the 26 EU member states, which enables us to collect price signals from thousands of retail shops operating on-line. We analyse pricing data of 182 branded products sold on-line across the EU, representing the most popular categories: fashion, consumer electronics, gaming and software, and cosmetics. We find considerable dispersion of both pre and post-vat on-line prices ranging from 20% to 40%, depending on the product category. The observed on-line price dispersion is driven by both cost factors and the level of per capita income, which is consistent with the view that producers or large distributors might engage in strategic price discrimination induced by income heterogeneity.At first look, our results point to the unexplored potential for cross-border trade, which could be released by policy interventions with regards to delivery, payment or law harmonization. However, under strategic price discrimination, reduced costs of arbitrage for consumers might induce discriminating firms to lower the magnitude of price dispersion between high and low income countries, bringing adverse welfare changes of a priori unknown net effect.

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Scraped Data and Sticky Prices

Cited by 61 publications

References 33 publications

Aggregation and the Staggering of Price Changes

Aggregation and the Staggering of Price Changes

The Data Revolution and Economic Analysis

What Drives Price Dispersion in the European E-commerce Industry?

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