We study a model of firm price setting with customer markets and empirically evaluate its predictions. Our framework captures the dynamics of customers in response to a change in the price set by firms, describes the behavior of optimal prices in the presence of customer retention concerns, and...

I study the impact of e-commerce on competition in retail markets. Using scanner data from a large chain that markets grocery online and through traditional stores, I illustrate that selling online reduces the barrier of geographic differentiation and allows stealing business from competitors....

We disentangle the contribution of unobserved heterogeneity in idiosyncratic demand and productivity to firm growth. We use a model of monopolistic competition with Cobb-Douglas production and a dataset of Italian manufacturing firms containing unique information on firm-level prices to reach...

Shopping on the Internet spares customers the discomfort of carrying around heavy and bulky baskets of goods, since the service usually includes home de- livery. This makes e-commerce a technology well suited to helping consumers to buy in bulk or to stockpile items on discount. I use grocery...

We study the price setting problem of a firm in the presence of both observation and menu costs. In this problem the firm optimally decides when to collect costly information on the adequacy of its price, an activity which we refer to as a price “review”. Upon each review, the firm chooses...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy when decision-makers in firms choose how much attention they devote to aggregate conditions. When the amount of attention that decision-makers in firms devote to aggregate conditions is exogenous, complete price stabilization is optimal only in response...

Asset prices and the equity premium might reflect doubts and pessimism. Introducing these features in an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model changes in a quite substantial way its normative conclusions. First, following productivity shocks, optimal policy should be very accommodative even to...

We compute the impulse response of output to an aggregate monetary shock in a general equilibrium when firms set prices subject to a costly observation of the state and a menu cost. We study how the aggregate effects of a monetary shock depend on the relative size of these costs. We find that...

We study a model in which prices respond slowly to shocks because firms must pay a fixed cost to observe the determinants of the profit maximizing price, as pioneered by Caballero (1989) and Reis (2006). We extend their analysis to the case of random transitory variation in the firm’s...

This paper studies a general equilibrium model that is consistent with recent empirical evidence showing that the U.S. price level and inflation are much more responsive to aggregate technology shocks than to monetary policy shocks. Specifically, we show that the fact that aggregate technology...