We use shifts in food Engel curves among the U.S. elderly to estimate the extent of Consumer Price Index (CPI) bias specific to this population. Over the last thirty years the share of total expenditure devoted to food has declined more rapidly for elderly-headed households than for other households. This decline is not explained by a more rapid increase in measured total expenditure for the el...

This paper characterizes the properties of various interest-rate rules in a basic forwardlooking model. We compare simple Taylor rules and rules that respond to price-level fluctuations (called Wicksellian rules). We argue that by introducing an appropriate amount of history dependence in policy, Wicksellian rules perform better than optimal Taylor rules in terms of welfare, robustness to alter...

This paper studies a general equilibrium model that is consistent with recent empirical evidence showing that the U.S. price level and in‡ation are much more responsive to aggregate technology shocks than to monetary policy shocks. Speci…cally, we show that the fact that aggregate technology shocks are more volatile than monetary policy shocks induces …rms to pay more attention to the former th...

This paper reviews analytical work carried out by central banks that participated in the Autumn Meeting of Central Bank Economists on “The evolving inflation process” which the BIS hosted on 28-29 October 2005. The paper first discusses efforts to document the univariate statistical properties of inflation and how they have changed over the last decades. It then reviews studies of disaggregated...

Pb(ZrxTi1-x)O3 [PZT] thin films of morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) composition having {001}, {110}, and {111}orientations were fabricated on silicon substrates (111)Pt/Ti/SiO2/Si using a metal organic decomposition spin-coating technique. The influence of crystallographic orientation on the transverse piezoelectric coefficient e31 * of the films have been determined. The largest e31 * was fou...

Since John Taylor’s (1993) seminal paper, a large literature has argued that active interest rate feedback rules, that is, rules that respond to increases in inflation with a more than one-for-one increase in the nominal interest rate, are stabilizing. In this paper, we argue that once the zero bound on nominal interest rates is taken into account, active interest-rate feedback rules can easily...

We develop a multi-sector sticky-price DSGE model that can endogenously deliver differential responses of prices to aggregate and sectoral shocks. Input-output production linkages induce across-sector pricing complementarities that contribute to a slow response of prices to aggregate shocks. In turn, labor-market segmentation at the sectoral level induces within-sector pricing substitutability,...

It is well known that late introduction of new Products into the CPI leads to an upward bias in the index. Moreover, improper treatment of quality improvement in the product will add to the upward bias. In this paper a hedonic elementary price index for accessing the Internet in Canada is constructed. We find that the quality-adjusted price index declines at about 15% per year. Detailed data ar...

We develop an inflationary finance model where transaction costs of the type suggested w by Barro, R., 1976. Integral constraints and aggregation in an inventory model of money x demand. Journal of Finance, Vol. 31, pp. 77–87 are assumed. The model implies that there is a single unstable steady state. This result is in sharp contrast to those of traditional inflationary finance literature in wh...

This paper develops a dynamic, stochastic, general-equilibrium (DSGE) model for the Canadian economy and evaluates the real effects of monetary policy shocks. To generate high and persistent real effects, the model combines nominal frictions in the form of costly price adjustment with real rigidities modelled as convex costs of adjusting capital and employment. The structural parameters identif...