[1][2] Steinsson's research focuses on empirical issues in macroeconomics, including price stickiness, the impact of fiscal shocks, and measurement errors in official statistics.
In his most cited work, "Five facts about prices", he and Emi Nakamura showed that many measured price changes are due to temporary sales, scheduled far in advance, rather than happening as dynamic responses to economic conditions.
[3] In another highly cited work, "Fiscal stimulus in a monetary union", he and Emi Nakamura use variation in US government military spending across states to estimate the open-economy government spending multiplier, finding values substantially higher than one.
This confirms the prediction of Keynesian macroeconomic models that fiscal stimulus can have substantial effects on output, particularly at the zero lower bound.
[3] Steinsson is married to fellow economist and frequent co-author Emi Nakamura, with whom he has two children.