We study optimal monetary policy for a small open economy in a model where both domestic prices and wages are sticky due to staggered contracts. The simultaneous presence of the two forms of nominal rigidities introduces an additional trade-off between domestic inflation and the output gap. We derive a second-order approximation to the average welfare losses that can be expressed in terms of th...

A model is considered where firms internalize the regret costs that consumers experience when they see an unexpected price change. Regret costs are assumed to be increasing in the size of price changes and this can explain why the size of price increases is less sensitive to inflation than in models with fixed costs of changing prices. The latter predict unrealistically large responses of price...

This paper analyses the trends in food price movements in South Africa between 1980 and 2008. There are three main results emanating from the analysis in this paper. Firstly, food price movements have played a large role in generating inflationary episodes in South Africa. Secondly, while external influences do matter, South African food price movements are mainly due to domestic influences. Th...

This paper investigates whether using natural logarithms (logs) of price indices for forecasting inflation rates is preferable to employing the original series. Univariate forecasts for annual inflation rates for a number of European countries and the USA based on monthly seasonal consumer price indices are considered. Stochastic seasonality and deterministic seasonality models are used. In man...

Inflation depends generically on current and expected monetary and fiscal policies. There are three ways to carry $1 today into the future: money, bonds, and real assets. That dollar’s purchasing power varies inversely with the price level. The real return on money depends on the flow of transactions services it supports and the expected inflation rate; the analogous return on bonds is the nomi...

Let me begin by stating categorically that, whatever else I may say today, I am for Price Stability. I'm also for Motherhood and apple pie. Of course, what I mean by that is that everyone is for price stability, but they often mean somewhat different things by it. How low an inflation rate should constitute price stability? Is zero the right number? Should we target the general level of prices,...