I am an Economics PhD candidate at the University of St. Andrews and a PhD research intern in Monetary Policy at the Bank of England. I submitted my PhD thesis: Essays on Price-Change Dynamics and Monetary Policy Transmission in August 2026, my PhD Viva is scheduled to take place in November 2026, and I am on the 2026/2027 Economics job market.

I previously completed my master’s degree in Models and Methods of Quantitative Economics at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and my double major bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Economics at Trinity College Dublin. I have numerous research interests which include: monetary economics, price-setting and inflation dynamics, macroeconomics, Bayesian macroeconometrics, DSGE models and microeconometrics. If you are interested in working on a research project with me within one of these fields, please reach out to me at richardsparkes@live.ie or rs344@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Research

Price-Change Dynamics across the Business Cycle: Evidence from Market Reference Prices
Job Market Paper

Abstract

This paper examines how frequently, and by how much, prices change across the U.S. business cycle. We analyse price rigidity across 1,110 retail product categories over 18 years using market reference prices, which we define as the modal price of identical products sold across all retail stores during the same week. We introduce a market reference price algorithm that more accurately measures aggregate nominal rigidity in the retail sector. The algorithm is implemented across the entire NielsenIQ retail scanner dataset, which contains granular data from over $4.8 trillion worth of retail sales between 2006–2023. We find that: (1) aggregate market reference prices are only mildly sticky, but there is substantial heterogeneity in price stickiness across retail products; (2) while posted price-change frequency exhibits a strong upward trend over 2006–2023, market reference price-change frequency remains largely stable; and (3) in low-inflation periods, variations in inflation are primarily accounted for by changes in the size of price adjustments rather than their frequency, whereas in high-inflation periods, the frequency of price increases becomes the dominant margin of adjustment.

Centralised Timing and Localised Sizing: Price-Setting in U.S. Retail Chains

Abstract

We show that U.S. retail chains adjust prices across their store networks at largely uniform frequencies, but this uniformity does not also extend to the size of these price changes. Price-change sizes are instead more influenced by individual store characteristics and local economic conditions. This paper examines the price-change dynamics of 71,386 U.S. retail stores over the period 2006–2023. Altogether, we analyse over 252 billion weekly price observations from these stores totalling over $5 trillion worth of retail sales. We document substantial variation in price-change dynamics across areas and retail store formats. We undertake an analysis of variance and clustering analysis to measure how uniform store-level price-change dynamics are within U.S. retail chains. We use the Gelbach decomposition to disentangle the contribution of relevant factors to the documented regional variation in price-change dynamics. We find that price-change frequency varies between rural and urban areas because the retail chains operating in these markets differ substantially. We also find that variation in price-change sizes between these areas is driven by stores’ average retail revenue and the county’s economic conditions.

Identifying the Transmission Mechanism of Central Bank Lending Operations

Abstract

This paper examines how central bank lending operations are transmitted via the bank lending channel to the real economy. We introduce a novel identification scheme for structural vector autoregressive models, which uses a mixture of sign and zero restrictions and programme-specific balance sheet data to isolate their effects. This framework is applied to the Bank of Korea’s Bank Intermediated Lending Support Facility and the European Central Bank’s longer-term refinancing operations and targeted longer-term refinancing operations. The results indicate that these monetary policy instruments reduced bank lending rate spreads, increased bank loan volumes, significantly reduced financial stress and provided sustained stimulus to the real economy. These findings suggest that these monetary policy instruments are efficacious for both financial and macroeconomic stabilisation purposes.

Work in Progress

Identifying Money Supply Shocks with Narrative Sign Restrictions
with Mauricio Salgado-Moreno (Bank of England)