the subject of monetary policy orientation and tailoring a framework within which the credibility and desirability of the policies and the policy makers is enhanced, while the most important goal of policies, i.e reaching to and preserving a low and stable inflation rate is achieved, has recently been a controversial issue for a large number of economists. in fact the necessity arised since the...

n the twenty years that preceded 1920 I there was a 245 percent increase in the average per-acre price of farmland (including improvements) before land values fell sharply. Today’s escalation in land values-364 percent between 1957 and 1977-prompts some pointed questions: Have land prices reached their peak? If not, when will they plateau, if ever? Will they then decline and, if so, will the de...

This paper studies the welfare cost of inflation in a frictional monetary economy with endogenous consumer search. Equilibrium entails price dispersion, where sellers compete for buyers by posting prices. We identify three channels through which inflation affects welfare. The real balance channel is the source of welfare loss. Its interaction with the price posting channel generates a welfare c...

This paper examines methods of controlling the supply shock in the estimation of the Phillips curve and discusses the relationship between the supply shock and inflation inertia. The empirical results clearly show that controlling the supply shock effect, not only for current inflation but also for lagged inflation using the asymmetry of the price change distribution, substantially outperforms ...

This paper examines the relationship between stock returns and inflation. We focus on various econometric techniques to test this relationship, using monthly values of the Athens Stock Exchange Price index and the Greek Consumer Price index over the period 1988-2002. The results from a simple OLS model show evidence of a positive but not significant relationship, while when we consider a system...

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...