Using Japanese scanner data of transaction prices and sales for more than 1,600 commodity groups from 1988 to 2008, we find a statistically significant negative correlation between the frequency of price changes and the degree of market concentration. We also find that structural factors of a distribution channel are significantly correlated with rigidity in retail prices. Decomposing the frequ...

This paper examines the effects of inflation and currency substitution volatility on the average rates of inflation and currency substitution for twelve emerging market economies. Using a bivariate GARCH-in-Mean model, which accommodates for asymmetric and spillover effects of inflation and currency substitution innovations on their volatilities, we find that for the majority of the countries i...

Much research studies US inflation history with a trend-cycle model with unobserved components. A key feature of this model is that the trend may be viewed as the Fed’s evolving inflation target or long-horizon expected inflation. We provide a new way to measure the slowly evolving trend and the cycle (or inflation gap), based on forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. These fore...

In this paper, we characterize conditions under which interest rate feedback rules that set the nominal interest rate as an increasing function of the inflation rate induce aggregate instability by generating multiple equilibria. We show that these conditions depend not only on the monetaryfiscal regime (as emphasized in the fiscal theory of the price level) but also on the way in which money i...

The objective of this paper is to provide an optimizing model of wage and price setting consistent with U.S. data. I first investigate the predictions of an optimizing labor supply model for the aggregate nominal wage, taking as given the evolution of prices and quantities. In this part I seek to determine whether a standard specification of households’ preferences over consumption and leisure ...

A challenge to models of equilibrium indeterminacy based on increasing returns is that required increasing returns for generating indeterminacy can be implausibly large and rise quickly with the relative risk aversion in labor. We show that unsynchronized wage adjustment via a relative wage effect can both lower the required degree of increasing returns for indeterminacy to a plausible level an...

This paper estimates a time-varying AR-GARCH model of inflation producing measures of inflation uncertainty for the euro area, and investigates the linkages between them in a VAR framework, also allowing for the possible impact of the policy regime change associated with the start of EMU in 1999. The main findings are as follows. Steady-state inflation and inflation uncertainty have declined st...

In this paper we develop the first search-theoretic monetary model of a two-country global economy. We show the connection between deep monetary frictions (i.e. search and matching frictions), capital holdup externalities, and the realization of an endogenous departure from the “excess smoothness” problem in the real exchange rate found in standard models. Using this alternative monetary model,...

This paper assesses the presence and importance of neo-Fisher effect in postwar data. It formulates estimates an empirical a New Keynesian model driven by stationary nonstationary monetary real shocks. In accordance with conventional wisdom, temporary increases nominal interest rate are estimated to cause decreases inflation output. The main finding is that permanent shocks increase long run ra...

Anatomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e27 Nystagmus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e31 Aetiology and classification of vertigo . . . . . . . e32 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e32 Clinical examination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e33 Interpretation of the examination . . . . . . . . . . e35 Therapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...