We use several U.S. and euro-area surveys of professional forecasters to estimate a dynamic factor model of inflation with time-varying uncertainty. We obtain survey-consistent distributions of future inflation at any horizon, both in the United States and in the euro area. Our methodology...

We study the behavior of inflation rates among the 12 initial Euro countries in order to test whether and when the group convergence initially dictated by the Maastricht treaty and now by the ECB, occurs. We also assess the impact of events such as the advent of the Euro and the 2008 financial...

It is generally assumed that the two Fisher components of the interest rate -the real interest and the inflation- evolve independently over time, considering that they are driven by unrelated economical events. However, the market pricing of those components deduced from newly-available bond...

Using a novel dataset from a large supermarket retailer in a European country that never engages in temporary sales, we establish that prices are actually as sticky as regular prices. Circumventing the debate on whether sales have to be included or excluded from price adjustments, we find...

We provide a quantitative assessment of the impact of imports from low-wage countries (LWCs) on CPI inflation in France during 1994-2014, using detailed micro data on imports and exports. The share of imports from low-wage countries in consumption increased from about 2% to 7%, and resulted in a...

We study how changes in the value of the steady-state real interest rate affect the optimal inflation target, both in the U.S. and the euro area, using an estimated New Keynesian DSGE model that incorporates the zero (or effective) lower bound on the nominal interest rate. We find that this...

In this paper, we study the fit and the predictive performance of the Phillips curve for euro area inflation with regard to different inflation series, time periods and predictor variables, notably different global factors. We compare the relative performance of a large set of alternative global...

I provide a microfounded theory for one of the oldest, but so far informal, explanations of price rigidity: the kinked demand curve theory. Assuming that some customers observe at no cost only the price of the store they happen to be at gives rise to a kink in firms' demand curves: a price...

We provide evidence that households discretize their inflation expectations so that what matters for durable consumption decisions is the broad inflation regime they expect. Using survey data, we document that a large share of the adjustment in the average inflation expectation comes from the...

Relying on a menu-cost model augmented with a time-dependent (Calvo) component, we investigate the structural sources of cross-sectoral heterogeneity in patterns of price setting. We use a large micro dataset of French consumer prices to estimate the model at the product level for 227 products....