The worst global downturn since the Great Depression has caused ballooning budget deficits in most nations, as tax revenues collapse and governments bail out financial institutions and attempt countercyclical fiscal policy. With notable exceptions, most economists accept the desirability of...

This paper challenges the conventional view according to which disinflations in LAC-even from low and moderate peaks-have been carried out at no cost to output. After suggesting a new methodology that allows for long-lived effects and inflation inertia when measuring costs of disinflations,...

A floating exchange rate combined with a clear inflation target can be a powerful stabilizer even if there are fluctuations in exchange rates that are unrelated to current fundamentals. Under plausible conditions, most of the stabilisation will occur through the exchange rate, and fundamental...

The objective of this paper is to provide an optimizing model of wage and price setting consistent with U.S. data. The paper first investigates the predictions of an optimizing labor supply model for the aggregate nominal wage, taking as given the evolution of prices and quantities. In this part...

This paper investigates the predictions of a simple optimizing model of nominal price rigidity for the dynamics of inflation. Taking as given the paths of nominal labor compensation and labor productivity to approximate the evolution of marginal costs, I determine the path of prices predicted by...

Staggered prices are a fundamental building block of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. In the standard model, prices are uniformly staggered but recent empirical evidence suggest that deviations from uniform staggering are common, This paper analyzes how...

It is commonly asserted that inflation is a jump variable in the New Keynesian Phillips curve, and thus wage-price inertia does not imply inflation inertia. We show that this "inflation flexibility proposition" is highly misleading, relying on the assumption that real variables are exogenous. In...

A major criticism against staggered nominal contracts is that they give rise to the so called "persistency puzzle" - although they generate price inertia, they cannot account for the stylised fact of inflation persistence. It is thus commonly asserted that, in the context of the new Phillips...

This paper introduces heterogeneous households into an otherwise standard sticky-price model with industry-specific labor markets. Households differ in labor incomes and asset markets are incomplete. I show that household heterogeneity affects equilibrium dynamics nontrivially by amplifying...