We investigate the possibility of synchronized and staggered equilibria in a version of the Dotsey-King-Wolman state-dependent pricing model. Our paper contributes to a large literature that considers synchronization of price changes (see, for example, Ball and Cecchetti [1988], Ball and Romer...

Inflation targeting is a monetary policy rule that has implications for both the average performance of an economy and its business cycle behavior. We use a modern, rational expectations model to study the twin effects of this policy rule. The model highlights forward- looking consumption and...

In a plain-vanilla New Keynesian model with two-period staggered price-setting, discretionary monetary policy leads to multiple equilibria. Complementarity between the pricing decisions of forward-looking firms underlies the multiplicity, which is intrinsically dynamic in nature. At each point...

A discretionary policy-maker responds to the state of the economy each period. Private agents' current behavior determines the future state based on expectations of future policy. Discretionary policy thus can lead to dynamic complementarity between private agents and a policy-maker, which in...

How often do the nominal prices of individual goods change? What is the nature of costs of price adjustment? How big are these costs? Answering these questions may be important for constructing macroeconomic models that are useful for monetary policy analysis. The empirical literature reveals...

Substantial attention has been devoted to inflation differentials within the European Monetary Union, including suggestions that inflation differentials are a policy issue for national governments. This paper investigates the ability of a region participating in a currency union to affect its...

Optimal monetary policy maximizes welfare, given frictions in the economic environment. Constructing a model with two sets of frictions - the Keynesian friction of costly price adjustment by imperfectly competitive firms and the Monetarist friction of costly exchange of wealth for goods - we...

In a canonical staggered pricing model, monetary discretion leads to multiple private sector equilibria. The basis for multiplicity is a form of policy complementarity. Specifically, prices set in the current period embed expectations about future policy, and actual future policy responds to...

The nature of price dynamics has long been thought important for the origin and duration of business cycles. To investigate this topic, we construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium macroeconomic model in which monopolistically competitive firms face fixed costs of changing the nominal...

Economists have long suggested that nominal product prices are changed infrequently because of fixed costs. In such a setting, optimal price adjustment should depend on the state of the economy. Yet, while widely discussed, statedependent pricing has proved difficult to incorporate into...