The Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday period is a major sales period for US retailers. Due to higher store traffic, tasks such as restocking shelves, handling customers' questions and inquiries, running cash registers, cleaning, and bagging, become more urgent during holidays. As a result, the...

This introductory essay briefly summarizes the eleven empirical studies of price setting and price adjustment that are included in this special issue. The studies, which use data from several European countries, were conducted as part of the European Central Bank's Inflation Persistence Network.

We analyze the determinants of the inflation trends in ten Southeast European (SEE) countries. Global cost-related factors and euro area (EA) inflation developments play an important role in explaining inflation dynamics in SEE countries. Changes in world food and energy prices, together with...

We develop a N-sector business cycle network model a la Long and Plosser (1983), featuring heterogenous money demand a la Bewley (1980) and Lucas (1980). Despite incomplete markets and a well-defined distribution of real money balances across heterogeneous households, the enriched N-sector...

This paper conducts a structural analysis of inflation persistence in the United Kingdom between 1965-2009. I allow for the possibility of shifts in the U.K. economy by estimating open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models in which parameters of a Taylor-type monetary policy...

The objective of this paper is to provide an optimizing model of wage and price setting consistent with U.S. data. The paper first investigates the predictions of an optimizing labor supply model for the aggregate nominal wage, taking as given the evolution of prices and quantities. In this part...

We thank three anonymous referees for thoughtful comments and suggestions which we found very constructive and helpful. We are particularly grateful to the editor, Al Klevorick, for his advice and painstaking guidance through the multiple revision process. We thank Robert Barsky, Susanto Basu,...

We offer the first direct evidence of an implicit contract in a goods market. The evidence we offer comes from the market for Coca-Cola. We demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company left a substantial amount of written evidence of its implicit contract with its consumers-a very explicit form of an...

The paper investigates the emergence of complex market expectations (opinion dynamics) around nominal exchange rate adjustments using a macro-financial model of a small open economy featuring heterogeneous expectation formation (chartists and fundamentalists) and gradual adjustment processes in...

We hope to model financial fragility and money in a way that captures much of what is crucial in Hyman Minsky's financial fragility hypothesis. This approach to modeling Minsky may be unique in the formal Minskyan literature. Namely, we adopt a model in which a psychological variable we call...