Sticky price models featuring heterogeneous firms and systematic firm-level productivity trends deliver radically different predictions for the optimal inflation rate than their popular homogenous-firm counterparts: (1) the optimal steady-state inflation rate generically differs from zero and...

We document a new stylized fact for the life-cycle behavior of consumer prices: relative to a narrowly defined set of competing products, the price of individual products tends to fall over the product lifetime. This holds true for more than 90% of the expenditure items underlying the U.K....

Using the official micro price data underlying the U.K. consumer price index, we document a new stylized fact for the life-cycle behavior of consumer prices: relative to a narrowly defined set of competing products, the price of individual products tends to fall over the product lifetime. We...

Using micro price data underlying the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices in France, Germany and Italy, we estimate relative price trends over the product life cycle and show that minimizing price and mark-up distortions in the presence of these trends requires targeting a significantly positive...