This paper documents producer price setting in 6 countries of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. It collects evidence from available studies on each of those countries and also provides new evidence. These studies use monthly producer price data. The following...

Using micro price data covering the Great Recession period, we document new facts on price rigidity in France: (i) each month, 17% of prices are changed versus 23% in the United States. When sales are excluded, only 14% of prices are modified in France versus 15% in the United States; (ii) the...

This paper develops a welfare-based model of monetary policy in an open economy. We focus on the extent to which monetary policy should be employed in maintaining the exchange rate. The traditional approach maintains that exchange rate flexibility is desirable in the presence of real...

The purchasing power parity puzzle relates to the adjustment of real exchange rates. Real exchange rates are extremely volatile, suggesting that temporary shocks emanate from the monetary sector. But the half-life of real exchange rate deviations is extremely large -- 2.5 to 5 years. This...

Relying on a menu-cost model augmented with a time-dependent (Calvo) component, we investigate the structural sources of cross-sectoral heterogeneity in patterns of price setting. We use a large micro dataset of French consumer prices to estimate the model at the product level for 227 products....