Projects

Current Research Highlights

Research is initiated and carried out by core faculty, typically on an individual basis but at times also with colleagues. CJEB may provide financial and administrative support as needed. At present, CJEB is actively supporting a number of major research projects by David Weinstein, Carl S. Shoup Professor of the Japanese Economy and Associate Director for Research of CJEB, and other affiliates of the Center and Columbia Business School.

The Japanese Economy and Macroeconomic Policies over the Last Twenty-Five Years

Professor Weinstein is one of three advisors to this important research project conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) of the Cabinet Office Government of Japan. As part of this greater project, he organized and chaired an international academic workshop, “Japan’s Bubble, Deflation and Long-term Stagnation” held on March 21 and 22, 2008 at Columbia University. Along with Professor Weinstein, Anil Kashyap, CJEB Research Associate and Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics and Finance at Chicago Graduate School of Business, and Koichi Hamada, CJEB Research Associate and Tuntex Professor of Economics at Yale University, will coedit a volume which is to be published based on the papers presented at the workshop.

Empirical Analysis of Barcode Data

Japanese Retail Prices

David Weinstein and Tsutomu Watanabe, CJEB Research Associate and Professor at Hitotsubashi University, have started a major collaboration that seeks to analyze 50 gigabytes of Japanese barcode data covering all purchases at a daily frequency in hundreds of Japanese stores from 1988 – 2005.  This is the largest barcode database in academia and access to his database in conjunction with other barcode data housed at Columbia has placed the Business School at the forefront of empirical analysis of prices and inflation.  In order to analyze these data, the Center has purchased a new server and hired a full time Research Coordinator, Morgan Hardy.  The Center’s initiatives in this area now comprise several projects.  The work should help us understand the extent to which Japanese fluctuations in productivity were driven by demand and supply factors.  In addition, Columbia professors Jon Steinsson, Emi Nakamura, and David Weinstein have teamed up with Tsutomu Watanabe to launch a project using these data which aims to understand the costs of inflation and deflation in Japan.  This project will examine how the volatility of process changes with inflation in order to understand whether concerns about inflation are warranted.

ACNielsen Homescan Databases

With the financial support of CJEB and the National Science Foundation, Professor Weinstein is conducting three new research projects that use massive amounts of US and Canadian barcode data drawn from the ACNielsen Homescan databases.

(1) The first project seeks to understand international market segmentation, and specifically to reexamine two key results about international price deviations: (a) the fact that borders give rise to flagrant violations of the law of one price (LOP), and (b) that international price adjustment occurs at much slower rates than what one would expect from micro data.

(2) The second research project will use data on all bar-coded products sold in different cities in the US to separately quantify the importance of agglomeration effects and better understand urban prices. The data are uniquely suited to understand simple questions for which national level data is insufficient, such as: Are goods prices in Chicago more expensive than Los Angeles? Or are the goods consumed in San Francisco different from those consumed in poorer areas of the U.S.? 

(3) The third project will assess whether the poor in America benefit from trade with China. The goal is to revisit this debate on trade and wages by relaxing several standard assumptions on how prices indexed are computed. Then, by matching detailed consumption data for 55,000 households in the US with existing disaggregate trade data, the study seeks to provide a new way of measuring the impact of globalization on prices of the goods consumed by households of different income levels. This also should yield new insights into how trade affects consumer prices.