Starting from the assumption that firms are more likely to adjust their prices when doing so is more valuable, this paper analyzes monetary policy shocks in a DSGE model with firm-level heterogeneity. The model is calibrated to retail price microdata, and inflation responses are decomposed into...

In an abstract economic model, we study optimal monetary policy from the timeless perspective under a general state-dependent pricing framework. We find that when firms are monopolistic competitors subject to idiosyncratic menu cost shocks, households have isoelastic preferences, and there is no...

We consider what, if any, relationship there is between monetary aggregates and inflation, and whether there is any substantial reason for modifying the current mainstream mode of policy analysis, which frequently does not consider monetary aggregates at all. We begin by considering the body of...

This note considers the reliability of Federal Reserve Board staff estimates of the output gap after the mid-1990s, and examines the usefulness of these estimates for inflation forecasting. Over this period, we find that the Federal Reserve's output gap is more reliably estimated in real time...

Building on the results in Nalewaik (FEDS 2015-93), this work models wage growth and core PCE price inflation as regime-switching processes, whose characteristics in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s differ fundamentally from their characteristics in the 1960s and from the mid-1990s to present....

The diminished sensitivity of inflation to changes in resource utilization that has been observed in many advanced economies over the past several decades is frequently linked to the increase in global economic integration. In this paper, we examine this "globalization" hypothesis using both...

We analyze the economic consequences of forming a monetary union among countries with varying degrees of financial distortions, which interact with the firms' pricing decisions because of customer-market considerations. In response to a financial shock, firms in financially weak countries (the...

We investigate whether the response of the macro-economy to oil price shocks undergoes episodic changes. Employing a regime-switching vector autoregressive model we identify two regimes that are characterized by qualitatively different patterns in economic activity and inflation following oil...

With the unemployment rate in the United States currently below estimates of its natural rate we examine if the relationship between inflation and unemployment is nonlinear. Using aggregate data we are unable to reject a linear relationship. However, using metropolitan-level data we find the...

We estimate the oil price pass-through into consumer prices both in the US and in the euro area. In particular, we disentangle the specific effect that an oil price change might have on each disaggregate price, from the effect on all prices that an oil price change might have since it affects...