Understanding the features and the determinants of individual price setting behaviour is important for the formulation of monetary policy. These behavioural mechanisms play a fundamental role in influencing the characteristics of aggregate inflation and in determining how monetary policy affects...

We document the behavior of trade prices during the Great Trade Collapse of 2008-2009 using transaction-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, we find that differentiated manufactures exhibited marked stability in their trade prices during the large decline in their trade...

The empirical evidence on rational inattention lags far behind the theoretical developments: micro evidence on the most immediate consequence of observation costs - the infrequent observation of state variables - is not available in standard datasets. We contribute to filling the gap with two...

This paper shows that virtually all of the rapid worsening of the US trade deficit since 1982 can be attributed to the balance on durable goods. Moreover, this deterioration has been concentrated in capital goods rather than consumer durables intertemporal prices play a key role in the...

We construct a theoretical framework to study the impact of asymmetric quality standards on used durable goods on trade flows, profits and consumer welfare. We show that asymmetry in quality standards generates trade in used goods from high to low standard countries while at the same time...

We examine the effect of the minimum wage on restaurant prices. For that purpose, we estimate a price rigidity model by exploiting a unique dataset of individual price quotes used to calculate the Consumer Price Index in France. We find a positive and significant impact of the minimum wage on...

The Calvo contract Phillips Curve is widely indexed for general inflation, using either core inflation or other backward-looking formulae. Such a Phillips Curve implies a high and persistent degree of nominal rigidity. It is argued here that optimal indexation would by contrast use the rational...