中文摘要
来自18个国家逾6万家餐馆和超市的单品层面网络抓取数据, 涵盖从零到20%的年化通货膨胀率, 揭示了通货膨胀与价格离散之间稳健的正向联动关系。次优的通货膨胀在所有通胀环境下都会扭曲单品层面的相对价格, 且扭曲程度在各部门之间存在异质性。当通货膨胀从零升至10%时, 超市的低效率价格离散高出46%, 餐馆的高出73%。这一关系在更高通胀水平下并未趋于平缓, 因此通货膨胀的边际成本并不会消失——这是标准菜单成本模型无法生成的模式。因此, 容忍更高的通货膨胀意味着巨大的福利成本。
Abstract
Product-level web-scraped data from over 60,000 restaurants and supermarkets across 18 countries, spanning annualized inflation rates from zero to 20 percent, reveal a robust positive comovement between inflation and price dispersion. Suboptimal inflation distorts product-level relative prices in all inflation environments and heterogeneously across sectors. As inflation rises from zero to 10 percent, inefficient price dispersion is 46 percent higher for supermarkets and 73 percent higher for restaurants. The relationship does not flatten at higher inflation, so the marginal cost of inflation does not vanish—a pattern standard menu-cost models do not generate. Accommodating higher inflation therefore entails substantial welfare costs.