Economists have long suggested that nominal product prices are changed infrequently because of fixed costs. In such a setting, optimal price adjustment should depend on the state of the economy. Yet, while widely discussed, statedependent pricing has proved difficult to incorporate into...

Though built with increasingly precise microfoundations, modern optimizing sticky price models have displayed a chronic inability to generate large and persistent real responses to monetary shocks, as recently stressed by Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan [2000]. This is an ironic finding, since...

State-dependent pricing (SDP) models treat the timing of price changes as a profit-maximizing choice, symmetrically with other decisions of firms. Using quantitative general equilibrium models that incorporate a "generalized (S,s) approach," the authors investigate the implications of SDP for...