This paper develops an open-economy macroeconomic model which can be used to interpret the observed fluctuations in output, inventories,prices,and exchange rates in the medium-sized economies of the world. The model is consistent with the major empirical regularities that have been discovered in...

Recent advances in measuring cyclical changes in the income distribution raise new questions: How might these distributional changes affect the business cycle itself? We show how counter-cyclical income dispersion can generate counter-cyclical markups in the goods market, without any preference...

In the data, prices change both temporarily and permanently. Standard Calvo models focus on permanent price changes and take one of two shortcuts when confronted with the data: drop temporary changes from the data or leave them in and treat them as permanent. We provide a menu cost model that...

Macroeconomic and microeconomic data paint conflicting pictures of price behavior. Macroeconomic data suggest that inflation is inertial. Microeconomic data indicate that firms change prices frequently. We formulate and estimate a model which resolves this apparent micro - macro conflict. Our...

We present a theory of collusive pricing in markets subject to business cycle fluctuations. In the business cycle model that we adopt, market demand alternates stochastically between fast-growth (boom) and slow-growth (recession) phases. We provide a complete characterization of the...

During recessions, output prices tend to rise relative to wages and raw-materials prices. One explanation of this fact is that imperfectly competitive firms compete less aggressively during recessions - that is, markups of price over marginal cost are countercyclical. We present a model in which...

If changes in aggregate demand were an important source of macroeconomic fluctuations, real wages would be countercyclical unless markups of price over marginal cost were themselves countercyclical. We thus examine three theories of markup variation at cyclical frequencies. The first assumes...

I examine price markups in monopolisticly-competitive markets that experience fluctuations in demand because the economy experiences cyclical fluctuations in productivity. Markups depend positively on the average income of purchasers in the market. For a nondurable good average income of...

Hall has pointed out that, when there is perfect competition and price flexibility, labor hoarding alone will not induce the Solow residual measured using labor's share in revenues to be procyclical. We show that, even with perfect competition, a small amount of price rigidity - we assume firms...

We study how relationship lending and transaction lending vary over the business cycle. We develop a model in which relationship banks gather information on their borrowers, which allows them to provide loans for profitable firms during a crisis. Due to the services they provide, operating costs...