Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to...

Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to...

We present a model in which temporary shocks can permanently scar the economy's productive capacity. Unemployed workers lose skill and are expensive to retrain, generating multiple steady state unemployment rates. Large temporary shocks push the economy into a liquidity trap, generating...

We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound,...

We investigate how bank migration across state lines over the last quarter century has affected the size and covariance of business fluctuations within states. Starting with a two-state version of the unit banking model in Holmstrom and Triocole (1997), we conclude that the theoretical effect of...

How rigid are producer prices? A longstanding conventional wisdom among economists holds that producer prices are more rigid than, and so play less of an allocative role than do, consumer prices. In the 1987-2008 microdata collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the producer price...

Border prices of traded goods are highly sensitive to exchange rates; however, the consumer price index (CPI) and the retail prices of goods that make up the CPI are more stable. This paper decomposes the sources of this price stability for twenty-one OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation...

Wage inequality in the United States has increased in the past two decades, and most researchers suspect that the main causes are changes in technology, international competition, and factor supplies. The relative importance of these causes in explaining wage inequality is important for policy...

This paper evaluates the consequences of the integration of international asset markets when goods markets are characterized by price rigidities. Using an open economy general equilibrium model with volatility in the money markets, we show that such an integration is not universally beneficial....

Since Friedman (1953), an advantage often attributed to flexible exchange rate regimes over fixed regimes is their ability to insulate more effectively the economy against real shocks. I use a post-Bretton Woods sample (1973-96) of seventy-five developing countries to assess whether the...