We study the propagation of nominal shocks in a dispersed information economy where firms learn from and respond to information generated by their activities in product and factor markets. We prove the existence of a "Hayekian benchmark", defined by conditions under which imperfect information...

A relation between inflation and the path of average marginal cost (often measured by unit labor cost) implied by the Calvo (1983) model of staggered pricing --- sometimes referred to as the "new-Keynesian Phillips curve"--- has been the subject of extensive econometric estimation and testing....

A dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open economy is presented where agents may choose the frequency of price changes. A fixed exchange rate is compared to inflation targeting and money targeting. A fixed rate generates more price flexibility than the other regimes when the expenditure...

Inflation equals the product of two terms: an extensive margin (the fraction of items with price changes) and an intensive margin (the average size of those price changes). The variance of inflation over time can be decomposed into contributions from each margin. The extensive margin figures...

We calculate the welfare cost of nominal inertia in a New Neoclassical Synthesis model with wage and price stickiness, capital formation, and empirically estimated rules for government spending and the cental bank's interest rate policy. We calibrate our model to U.S. data, and we show that it...

Erceg et al. (2000) show that when both wages and prices are sticky, maximization of expected utility is equivalent to minimizing a loss function with three terms, involving measures of the variability of wage inflation, price inflation and the output gap respectively. Here we generalize their...

Can variants of the classic Calvo (1983) model of sticky prices account for the statistical behavior of post-war US inflation? We develop and test versions of the model for which the answer to this question is yes. We then investigate whether these models imply plausible degrees of inertia in...

We introduce rule-of-thumb consumers in an otherwise standard dynamic sticky price model, and show how their presence can change dramatically the properties of widely used interest rate rules. In particular, the existence of a unique equilibrium is no longer guaranteed by an interest rate rule...

In a plain-vanilla New Keynesian model with two-period staggered price-setting, discretionary monetary policy leads to multiple equilibria. Complementarity between the pricing decisions of forward-looking firms underlies the multiplicity, which is intrinsically dynamic in nature. At each point...

Multi-sector sticky price models have surprising implications when durable goods have flexible prices. While in actual data the production of virtually all durables exhibits strong negative responses to monetary contractions, in dynamic general equilibrium models a monetary contraction causes...