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 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...

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...

A striking fact about pricing is the prevalence of \sales": large temporary price cuts followedby prices returning exactly to their former levels. This paper builds a macroeconomic modelwith a rationale for sales based on firms facing customers with different price sensitivities.Even if firms...

Recent literature on the design of optimal monetary policy has shown that deviations fromprice stability are small whenever prices are sticky. This paper reconsiders this issue byintroducing capital accumulation in the model. Optimal monetary policy in this setupimplies small deviations from...

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...

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...