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...

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...

This paper juxtaposes the policy trend towards price stability with the theoretical optimal quantity of money. After reviewing alternatives to the Friedman (1969) optimum, it focuses on the effect of costly nominal adjustment as a result of inflation.

In the first section the authors discuss the nature of cyclical features and the distinction between the traditional analysis of co-movement discussed in the business cycles literature and the more recent common cycles analysis. Section 2 examines the nature of the data used in the estimation...

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...