Sticky Prices vs. Sticky Information: A Cross-Country Analysis of Second Moments

This paper provides an empirical comparison of the sticky-price and the sticky information Phillips curves on the basis of second moments of inflation for six countries, the US, the UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Japan. We evaluate the models' abilities to match empirical second moments of inflation evaluating moment distributions generated by model simulation. The absolute deviation of model moments to data moments is lower for sticky information but the joint density of the observed moments is higher for sticky prices. We also find that sticky information would need an unusually high degree of real rigidity to perform similar to sticky prices.