In most European countries, money wages are given in collective agreements or individual employment contracts, and the employer cannot unilaterally cut wages, even after the expiration of a collective agreement. Ceteris paribus, workers have a stronger bargaining position when they try to...

We estimate the effects of monetary policy on price-setting behavior in administrative micro data underlying the German producer price index. We find a strong degree of monetary nonneutrality. After expansionary monetary policy, the mass of additional price adjustments is economically small and...

We study the Ramsey optimal monetary policy within the Golosov and Lucas (2007) state-dependent pricing framework. The model provides micro-foundations for a nonlinear Phillips curve: the sensitivity of inflation to activity increases after large shocks due to an endogenous rise in the frequency...

This paper explores communication strategies for anchoring households’ medium-term inflation expectations in a high inflation environment. We conducted a survey experiment with a representative sample of 4,000 German households at the height of the recent inflation surge in early 2023, with...

This paper studies the causal effect of inflation literacy on inflation expectations and trust in the central bank using a randomized control trial (RCT) on a representative sample of the German population. In an experiment with two steps, we first test the effect of non-numerical information...

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...

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...

We study the transmission of monetary policy shocks in a model in which realistic heterogeneity in price rigidity interacts with heterogeneity in sectoral size and input-output linkages, and derive conditions under which these heterogeneities generate large real effects. Empirically,...