The Federal Reserve Board has released a research paper that examines the 2021‑2022 grocery inflation episode using scanner data from 50,000 retail outlets. The study finds that price changes for similar goods became more dispersed in 2022, then narrowed again in 2023. It shows that household inflation rates widened from a 1.4‑percentage‑point interquartile range in 2019 to 4.0 points in 2022, before falling to 1.6 points in 2023. Households largely did not offset budget shocks through substitution. A model of idiosyncratic preferences indicates that inflation rates serve as bounds on welfare losses, which were estimated at $573 for the 10th percentile and $1,145 for the 90th percentile of households with average grocery spending during the peak of 2022 inflation.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/a-new-reason-to-hate-grocery-inflation-measuring-and-interpreting-inflation-heterogeneity.htm
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