An optimizingmodel, with a flexible-price sector and a sticky-price sector, ispresented to analyze the effects of relative-price changes on inflation fluctuations. Therelative price of the flexible-price good represents a shift parameter of the NewKeynesian Phillips curve. The optimal monetary...

This paper studies an advantage of commitment over discretion when a central bankobserves only noisy measures of current inflation and output, in the context of an optimizingmodel with nominal-price stickiness. Under a commitment regime, if current policy turns outto be too expansionary...

This study analyzes a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities,monopolistic competition and producer currency pricing. A quadratic approximation to the utility ofthe consumers is derived and assumed as the policy objective function of the policymakers.It is shown...

We describe a behavior of a central bank when its measures of current inflation and outputare subject to measurement errors, in a framework of optimizing models with nominal pricestickiness. In our model, a central bank sets the interest rate equal to its current estimate of theso-called...

This paper investigates the relationship between inflation uncertainty and the investmentdecisions of small, micro…finance-funded …firms in the Dominican Republic. An extensive literature documents the array of opposing factors linking inflation uncertainty and investment;ultimately this...

In recent macroeconomic theory, relative price variability (RPV) generates the central distortions of inflation. This paper provides first evidence on the empirical relation between inflation and RPV in the euro area focusing on threshold effects of inflation. We find that expected inflation...

This paper investigates the relevance of the sticky information model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) and Carroll (2003) for four major European economies (France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom). As opposed to the benchmark rational expectation models, households in the sticky information...

We examine the global dimension of inflation in 24 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007 in a traditional Phillips curve framework. We decompose output gaps and changes in unit labor costs into common (or global) and idiosyncratic components using a factor analysis and introduce these components...

[...]This article explores the inflation puzzle andinvestigates whether compensation has acted as either atemporary restraint on inflation or as the underlying sourceof a new inflation regime.2 After reviewing the recent behavior of inflation, we specify and estimate a traditionalprice-inflation...

Many features of the German monetary targetingregime are also key elements of inflationtargeting in the other countries examined inthis study. Indeed, as pointed out in Bernanke and Mishkin(1997), Germany might best be thought of as a “hybrid”inflation targeter, in that it has more in common...