Sales Filters and Regular Price Rigidity

We use new daily retail price data from 12 supermarket chains and one drugstore chain. The data covers 2,403 products sold in 106 stores, over the period January 1, 2018–April 8, 2021, with a total of about 108 million price observations. A unique aspect of the data is that it contains the actual regular prices along with the actual transaction prices. We use the data to study the rigidity of both the transaction prices and the regular prices. We employ four sales filters to generate regular prices. We compare the rigidity of the generated regular prices to the rigidity of the actual regular prices. We conduct the analyses at both daily and weekly frequencies. We assess the implications of our findings for the effectiveness of monetary policy using sufficient statistics for both actual and generated series.