Incomplete Price Adjustment and Inflation Persistence

Inflation an Asymmetric Price Adjustment

This paper uses a unique micro data set to test for the presence of price asymmetries at the firm level. We find that firm pricing is indeed asymmetric, as Tobin (1972) suggested long ago. Moreover, there is strong evidence to support Ball and Mankiw's (1994) suggestion that firm price asymmetry is dependent on inflation. However, Ball and Mankiw's theory seems to hold better for changes in cos...

Relative Price Distortions and Inflation Persistence

Sticky-price models often suggest that relative price distortion is a major cost of in‡ation. We provide an intuition for this: Even at low rates, in‡ation strongly a¤ects price dispersion which in turn has an impact on the economy qualitatively similar to, and of the order of magnitude of, a negative shift in productivity. The utility cost of price dispersion is quanti…ed and its impact on opt...

Price Setting and Inflation Persistence in Austria

Price Setting and Inflation Persistence in Austria

Staggered Price Contracts and Inflation Persistence: Some General Results

Despite their popularity as theoretical tools for illustrating the effects of nominal rigidities, some have questioned whether models based on Taylor-style staggered contracts can match the persistence of the empirical inflation process. This paper presents some general theoretical results about Taylor-style models. It is shown that these models do not have a problem matching high autocorrelati...