Inflation has fallen dramatically in countries like Spain and Italy over the last decade, but the rate of increase in "home good" prices remains stubbornly higher than the rate of increase in "traded good" prices. The paper begins by showing that this discrepancy can be explained (at least in...

This paper studies two aspects of the behaviour of provincial relative prices in Spain: the relevance and the nature of provincial inflation divergences and relative price shifts. Inflation differentials are found to be small (the range is less than half point per year in the long-run), but...

One of the most significant economic developments of recent years in industrialized countries has been the increasing orientation of macroeconomic policies - and of monetary policies in particular - to achieving lower inflation rates. This has led to a move from low inflation to price stability...

Recent literature reaches contrasting conclusions on the ability of price/wage staggering models to generate output persistence. The authors derive fairly general results from a stylised log-linear model which encompasses most of the microfound model of price/wage staggering.

A fresh interpretaion is provided of the influential finding that the markup of prices over marginal costs is counter-cyclical. Using Rotemberg and Woodford's data set we argue that the markup is best modelled as a variable that is integrated of order one. A consequence of this finding is that...

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the implications for aggregate price dynamics of alternative characterizations of microeconomic price adjustment policies. Within the hazard adjustment framework developed in Caballero and Engel (1993a), we present alternative models of individual price...

This paper looks at the long term output effect of those monetary policies aimed at reducing inflation from its peak by late seventies, in nine major OECD countries. The estimated effect depends on the way nominal shocks are identified. Alternatively to the cross-country regression analysis we...

The liquidity effect, defined as a decrease in nominal interest rates in response to a monetary expansion, is a major stylized fact of the business cycle. This paper seeks to understand under what conditions such an effect can be explained in a general equilibrium model with sticky prices and...

An I(2) analysis of inflation and the markup is undertaken for the G7 economies and Australia. We find that the levels of prices and costs are best described as I(2) processes and that except for Japan a linear combination of the log levels or prices and costs cointegrate to the markup that is...