This paper studies two aspects of the behaviour of provincial relative prices in Spain: the relevance and the nature of provincial inflation divergences and relative price shifts. Inflation differentials are found to be small (the range is less than half point per year in the long-run), but...

This paper documents producer price setting in 6 countries of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. It collects evidence from available studies on each of those countries and also provides new evidence. These studies use monthly producer price data. The following...

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Spain suffered high rates of inflation but inflation declined and by 1997 inflation had fallen to approximately 2 percent. To fight inflation, Spain implemented austere monetary programs, joined the EMS in 1989, enacted central bank autonomy in 1994, and...

This paper presents original evidence on price setting in the euro area at the individual level. We use micro data on consumer (CPI) and producer (PPI) prices, as well as survey information. Our main findings are: (i) prices in the euro area are sticky and more so than in the US; (ii) there is...

We study optimal monetary policy from the timeless perspective in a general state-dependent pricing framework. Firms are monopolistic competitors and are subject to idiosyncratic menu cost shocks. We find that, under isoelastic preferences and no government spending, strict price stability is...

The present study of the Agency for Economic Programming and Development aims to characterize the inflation process based on the existing measures, as well as on the elaborated custom indices. The paper put special focus on the assessment of the real interest rate level during 1991.

This paper identifies the basic features of price setting behaviour at the producer level in the Spanish economy using a large dataset containing the micro data underlying the construction of the PPI over the period 1991 1999. The paper explores how these general features are affected by some...

The purpose of the present paper is twofold. First, we characterize de Fed's systematic response to technology shocks and its implications for US output, hours and inflation. Second we evaluate the extent to which that responses can be accounted for by a simple monetary policy rule in the...

Recent treatments of the issue of a zero floor on nominal interest rates have been subject to some important methodological limitations. These include the assumption of perfect foresight or the introduction of the zero lower bound as an initial condition or a constraint on the variance of the...