While the financial protection measures enacted by the ECB and the community of Eurozone members have calmed financial markets, they have left the competitiveness problem of the Eurozone’s southern countries and France unresolved. The paper compares price inflation before the crisis with the...

We investigate the international linkages of inflation uncertainty in the G7. In a first step, we document that inflation uncertainty in the G7 is intertwined. Moreover, the degree of synchronization has increased during the recent two decades. Second, based on a Factor-Structural Vector...

Since the late 1970s, the price indices underlying the poverty lines in India have been updated using aggregate indices. Widespread criticism of these indices led to the adoption of a new official methodology in 2011 based on unit values from consumption survey data. We propose an alternative...

Empirical data show that firms tend to improve their ranking in the productivity distribution over time. A sticky-price model with firm-level productivity growth fits this data and predicts that the optimal long-run inflation rate is positive and between 1.5% and 2% per year. In contrast, the...

In this paper we incorporate the two most prominent approaches of inequality aversion, i.e. Fehr and Schmidt (1999) and Bolton and Ockenfels (2000) into an otherwise standard New Keynesian macro model and compare them with respect to their influence on the long-run effectiveness of monetary...

This paper shows that announced credible disinflations under inflation targeting lead to a boom in a standard New Keynesian model (i.e. a disinflationary boom). This finding is robust with respect to various parameterizations and disinflationary experiments. Thus, it differs from previous...

We present a new partial equilibrium theory of price adjustment, based on consumer loss aversion. In line with prospect theory, the consumers' perceived utility losses from price increases are weighted more heavily than the perceived utility gains from price decreases of equal magnitude. Price...

In this paper we empirically investigate the time- and state-dependent behavior of aggregate price setting. We implement a testing procedure by means of a nonparametric representation of the structural form New Keynesian Phillips curve. By means of the so-called functional coefficient regression...

The paper studies the effects of credible disinflation in the presence of real wage rigidity, comparing the Calvo and Rotemberg price setting mechanisms (the two popular variants of the New-Keynesian model). In both types of models, a credible, gradual disinflation is shown to lead to a delayed...

Deflation is said to dampen aggregate demand because consumers would defer purchases while waiting for prices to fall further in the future. We explore the validity of this reasoning at the level of individual goods. Our findings suggest that the widespread concerns about impaired aggregate...