For standard calibration, this paper shows that the optimal price, in a model with Calvo form of price stickiness and strategic complementarities, is only defined for annualised trend inflation rates of under 5.5%. This critical inflation rate is below the average inflation rate over recent...

Although the target of monetary policy is clear, there have been suggestions that the conduct of monetary policy is improved by monitoring trimmed mean inflation rates, the mean of some central portion of the distribution of price changes. This paper assesses critically the theoretical and...

In this paper a version of the rational expectations hypothesis is tested using fixed-event inflation forecasts for the UK. Fixed-event forecasts consist of a panel of forecasts for a set of outturns of a series at varying horizons prior to each outturn. The forecasts are the prediction of fund...

This paper is related to a large recent literature studying the Phillips curve in sticky-price equilibrium models. It differs in allowing for the degree of price stickiness to be determined endogenously. A closed-form solution for short-term inflation is derived from the dynamic stochastic...

This paper quantifies for the United Kingdom the general equilibrium costs of individuals holding cash to economise on 'shopping time'. These are a subset of a wider range of costs caused by inflation. The paper tests whether or not money balances tend to a finite number as nominal interest...

In recent work, Stacey Tevlin and Karl Whelan argue that aggregate econometric models fail to capture the US investment boom in plant and machinery in the second half of the 1990s, whereas a disaggregated approach does much better. In particular, they show that aggregate models do not capture...

This paper analyses the impact of rapid technological change in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector on economic growth. Technological change in the ICT sector leads to a fall in the relative price of ICT goods, which leads firms to invest more heavily in high-tech goods....

The Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) assumes that individuals base their decisions on lifetime wealth, not current income. Textbook versions of the PIH predict that the elasticity of consumption with respect to human wealth is equal to the share of human wealth in total wealth. Comparing...

This paper quantifies some of the costs of inflation in the United Kingdom. It focuses in particular on inflation distortions under an imperfectly indexed tax system and distortions to money demand. In the United States, an earlier study by Feldstein found that lowering inflation by 2 percentage...

This paper tests for unbiasedness in inflation expectations drawn from a survey of UK employees by Gallup. It focuses on the econometric difficulties presented by having a small sample, there being overlapping forecast horizons and by trying to make inference when the data appear to be...