In a VAR model of the US, the response of the relative price of durables to a monetary contraction is either flat or mildly positive. It significantly falls only if narrowly defined as the ratio between new house and nondurables prices. These findings survive three identification strategies and...

Using an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with banking, this paper first provides evidence that monetary policy reacted to bank loan growth in the US during the Great Moderation. It then shows that the optimized simple interest-rate rule features virtually no response to...

How should central banks optimally aggregate sectoral inflation rates in the presence of imperfect labor mobility across sectors? We study this issue in a two-sector New-Keynesian model and show that a lower degree of sectoral labor mobility, ceteris paribus, increases the optimal weight on...