Real wage rigidities have recently been proposed as a way of building intrinsic persistence in inflation within the context of New Keynesian Phillips Curves. Using two recent illustrative structural models, we evaluate empirically the importance of real wage rigidities in the data and the extent...

This paper introduces heterogeneous beliefs among households in a small open economy model for the Canadian economy. The model suggests that simultaneous boom-bust cycles in house prices, output, investment, consumption and hours worked emerge when credit-constrained mortgage borrowers expect...

We examine the extent to which vertical and horizontal market structure can together explain incomplete retail pass-through. To answer this question, we use scanner data from a large U.S. retailer to estimate product level pass-through for three different vertical structures: national brands,...

A "sunspot" is a variable that has no direct impact on the economy’s fundamental condition, such as preferences, endowments or technologies, but may nonetheless affect economic outcomes through the expectations channel as a coordination device. This paper investigates how people react to...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns (“sales”) by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the...

The author studies the effects of capital reallocation (the flow of productive capital across firms and establishments mainly through changes in ownership) on aggregate labour productivity. Capital reallocation is an important activity in the United States: on average, its total value is 3-4 per...

In this paper, we examine how the effect of movements in the real exchange rate on manufacturing plants depends on the plant’s placement within the productivity distribution. Appreciations of the local currency expose domestic plants to more competition from abroad as export opportunities...

Pricing-to-market (PTM) theory suggests that monopolistic firms which export adjust their destination-specific markups in reaction to exchange rate shocks. These adjustments limit changes in the price of their exports. Thus, important movements in the bilateral nominal exchange rate between two...

The author reviews the theoretical and empirical literature to examine the traditional perception that the following trade-off exists between economic efficiency and stability in the banking system: a competitive banking system is more efficient and therefore important to growth, but market...

The authors examine the impact of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on exchange rate pass-through in an environment where an MNE engages in Cournot (quantity) competition with domestic and foreign rivals. The MNE differs from its competitors because it has a lower marginal cost as a result of...