This paper proposes a novel international transmission mechanism based on the assumption of deep habits. The term deep habits stands for a preference specification according to which consumers form habits on a good-by-good basis. Under deep habits, firms face more elastic demand functions in...

This paper shows that in a small open economy model with downward nominal wage rigidity pegging the nominal exchange rate creates a negative pecuniary externality. This peg-induced externality is shown to cause unemployment, overborrowing, and depressed levels of consumption. The paper...

The combination of a fixed exchange rate and downward nominal wage rigidity creates a real rigidity. In turn, this real rigidity makes the economy prone to involuntary unemployment during external crises. This paper presents a graphical analysis of alternative policy strategies aimed at...

Since the onset of the great recession in peripheral Europe, nominal hourly wages have not fallen much from the high levels they had reached during the boom years in spite of widespread increases in unemployment. This observation evokes a well-known narrative in which nominal downward wage...

A key result of a recent literature that focuses on the global consequences of Taylor-type interest rate feedback rules is that such rules, in combination with the zero-bound on nominal interest rates, can lead to unintended liquidity traps. An immediate question posed by this result is whether...

Once the zero-bound on nominal interest rates is taken into account, Taylor-type interest-rate feedback rules give rise to unintended self-fulfilling decelerating inflation paths and aggregate fluctuations driven by arbitrary revisions in expectations. These undesirable equilibria exhibit the...

The existing literature on the stabilizing properties of interest-rate feedback rules has stressed the perils of linking interest rates to forecasts of future inflation. Such rules have been found to give rise to aggregate fluctuations due to self-fulfilling expectations. In response to this...

This paper introduces deep habits into a sticky-price sticky-wage economy and asks whether the countercyclical markup movements induced by deep habits is helpful for accounting for the dynamic effects of monetary policy shocks. We find that this is the case: When allowing for deep habits, the...

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...

This paper identifies a new source of business-cycle fluctuations. Namely, a common stochastic trend in neutral and investment-specific productivity. We document that in U.S. postwar quarterly data total factor productivity (TFP) and the relative price of investment are cointegrated. We show...