In the past fifteen years, an extraordinary development has occurred in economies throughout the world: inflation has fallen dramatically in many industrialised as well as emerging-market countries, to the point where many of them have reached what might arguably be called price stability. Why did this happen and how did policy-makers achieve this feat? This paper examines these questions by fi...

The realized size and value premia reflect earnings-induced price surprises that do not fit the rational pricing story. In addition, they seem to have little to do with systematic risks. This is because the majority of value or small firms with persistently high systematic risks are not rewarded with a premium. The premium happens, as a price adjustment, only to the subset of migrating firms wh...

The Maastricht Treaty contains the following statutory mandate: “The primary objective of the ESCB shall to be to maintain price stability.“ But why attach such importance to price stability and what does “price stability” mean? The latter question contains an historical component, the former is of a theoretical nature. I will therefore deal with the “what” and the “why” of my theme in the foll...

The idea of treating factor price equalization as a situation, where the distribution of factors among countries is compatible with an equilibrium in an integrated world economy, has been refined to give the so-called lens condition for factor price equalization. In this paper, we show that the lens condition may be used to give estimates for the probability of factor price equalization when fa...

There are numerous sources of bias in medical care price indices that lead to non-trivial biases in overall price indices such as the GDP deflator and the Consumer Price Index. I begin by reviewing various uses of price indices and therefore why both biases and changes in those biases matter. I describe the theory underlying official price indices. I next turn to problems of measuring medical p...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to evaluate the applicability of data obtained from a wearable activity tracker (Fitbit Charge HR) to medical research. This was performed by comparing the wearable activity tracker (Fitbit Charge HR) with actigraphy (Actiwatch 2) for sleep evaluation and circadian rest-activity rhythm measurement. METHODS Sixteen healthy young adults (female participan...

Early dialogues between parent and child constitute an important factor for the acquisition of culture and hence verbal interaction is considered to be a universal parenting system. Parenting strategies and socialization practices are strongly influenced by the cultural conception of the self, prototypically defined as the model of independence and interdependence. Our study focuses on the temp...

Sellers of almost any product or service rarely keep their prices constant through time, and frequently offer price discounts or sales. This paper investigates an explanation of sales as a way for uninformed consumers to be willing to experience the product, and learn about its fit, and where informed consumers may forget about (or change) their preferences. We investigate the role of the rate ...

This article serves as the introduction to the special issue on comparison-shopping and recommendation agents and provides a brief overview of the four papers included in the issue indicating their contributions. It also offers the guest editors’ perspectives on the future research in this field.

Attached is a formal analysis of a large sample of cartel overcharges that I believe is relevant to your consideration of remedies for naked price fixing. This research suggests that differences in methods of calculating overcharges do not have much effect on variation in the size of those calculations. That is, antitrust prosecutors may be unjustified in their concerns about the difficulties o...