This introductory essay briefly summarizes the eleven empirical studies of price setting and price adjustment that are included in this special issue. The studies, which use data from several European countries, were conducted as part of the European Central Bank's Inflation Persistence Network.

The price system, the adjustment of prices to changes in market conditions, is the primary mechanism by which markets function and by which the three most basic questions get answered: what to produce, how much to produce and for whom to produce. To the behaviour of price and price system,...

Textual analysis of the NBER Working Papers published during 1999-2016 is done to assess the effects of the 2007-2009 crisis on the academic literature. The volume of crisis-related WPs is counter-cyclical, lagging the financial-instability-index. WPs by the Monetary-Economics, Asset-Pricing,...

If producers have more information than consumers about goods' attributes, then they may use non-price (rather than price) adjustment mechanisms and, consequently, the market may reach a new equilibrium even if prices remain sticky. We study a situation where producers adjust the quantity (per...

We thank three anonymous referees for thoughtful comments and suggestions which we found very constructive and helpful. We are particularly grateful to the editor, Al Klevorick, for his advice and painstaking guidance through the multiple revision process. We thank Robert Barsky, Susanto Basu,...

We offer the first direct evidence of an implicit contract in a goods market. The evidence we offer comes from the market for Coca-Cola. We demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company left a substantial amount of written evidence of its implicit contract with its consumers-a very explicit form of an...

Using unique retail and wholesale price data for 4,532 products carried by a major Mid-western grocery retailer, we find evidence of significant retail price rigidity during the Thanksgiving through Christmas holiday period relative to the rest of the year. We suggest that this pattern of...

We combine two data sets to study price rigidity. The first consists of weekly time series of retail, wholesale, and spot prices for twelve products. These time series contain two exogenous cost shocks. We find that prices exhibit more rigidity in response to the second shock than the first. The...

In this study, we empirically examine the extent of price rigidity using a unique store-level time series data set—consisting of (i) actual retail transaction prices, (ii) actual wholesale transaction prices which represent both the retailers’ costs and the prices received by manufacturers,...