This paper analyzes the potential effect of global market competition on inflation dynamics. It does so through the lens of the Calvo model of staggered price setting, which implies that inflation depends on expected future inflation and a measure of marginal costs. I modify the assumption of a...

We construct a price index with weights for the prices of different PCE (personal consumption expenditures) goods chosen to minimize the welfare costs of nominal distortions. In this cost-of-nominal-distortions index (CONDI), the weights are computed in a multi-sector New Keynesian model with...

This paper revisits inflation forecasting using reduced-form Phillips curve forecasts, that is, inflation forecasts that use activity and expectations variables. We propose a Phillips-curve-type model that results from averaging across different regression specifications selected from a set of...

Conventional wisdom suggests that producer prices are more rigid than consumer prices and therefore play less of a role in the allocation of goods and services. Analyzing 1987-2008 microdata collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the producer price index, we find that producer...

We study the implications of increased price flexibility on aggregate output volatility in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. First, using a simplified version of the model, we show analytically that the results depend on the shocks driving the economy and the systematic...

It has been argued that existing DSGE models cannot properly account for the evolution of key macroeconomic variables during and following the recent Great Recession, and that models in which inflation depends on economic slack cannot explain the recent muted behavior of inflation, given the...

I establish that inflation risk is priced in the cross section of stock returns: Stocks that have low returns during inflationary times command a risk premium. I estimate a market price of inflation risk that is comparable in magnitude to the price of risk for the aggregate market. Inflation is...

Using the panel component of the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we show that individuals, in particular women and ethnic minorities, are highly heterogeneous in their expectations of inflation. We estimate a model of inflation expectations based on learning from experience that also allows for...

How strong are strategic complementarities in price setting across firms? In this paper, we provide a direct empirical estimate of firms' price responses to changes in prices of their competitors. We develop a general framework and an empirical identification strategy to estimate the...

We provide a tractable model to study monetary policy under discretion. We restrict our analysis to Markov equilibria. We find that for all parametrizations with an equilibrium inflation rate of about 2 percent, there is a second equilibrium with an inflation rate just above 10 percent. Thus,...