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 show that strategic complementarities–such as firm-specific factors or quasikinked demand–have crucial implications for the design of monetary policy and for the welfare costs of output and inflation variability. Recent research has mainly used log-linear approximations to...

This paper compares the welfare effects of anticipated and unanticipated cost-push shocks within the canonical New Keynesian model with optimal monetary policy. We find that, for empirically plausible degrees of nominal rigidity, the anticipation of a future cost-push shock leads to a higher...

This paper studies the relative performance of alternative monetary policy rules in the presence of oil price shocks in a small open economy optimizing model. Our analysis shows that it is important to distinguish between alternative price indices (CPI, core CPI, and GDP deflator) when modeling...

Conjectures about inflation expectations are inextricably linked to our understanding of the relationship between the real and monetary sides of the economy; yet, direct empirical research on the matter has been scarce at best. This paper therefore examines the empirical properties of inflation...

Following Driscoll and Holden (2004), I model forward-looking workers who consider it unfair if a wage adjustment fails to match past inflation. However, the present paper proposes a much larger effect by using the job finding rate as the measure of workers' opportunities outside the firm rather...

This paper studies the effects of credit supply disruptions in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework. First, this paper examines the effects of credit supply disruptions in the business sector. The model with financially constrained households generates a bigger decline in...

A major criticism against staggered nominal contracts is that they give rise to the so called "persistency puzzle" - although they generate price inertia, they cannot account for the stylised fact of inflation persistence. It is thus commonly asserted that, in the context of the new Phillips...