In this paper, we argue that differences in the cost structures across sectors play an important role in firms' decisions to adjust their prices. We develop a menu-cost model of pricing in which retail firms intermediate trade between producers and consumers. An important facet of our analysis...

We study the cyclical properties of sales, regular price changes and average prices paid by consumers ("effective" prices) using data on prices and quantities sold for numerous retailers across many U.S. metropolitan areas. Inflation in the effective prices paid by consumers declines...

We construct new indicators of the imbalance between demand and supply for the Canadian economy by using natural language processing techniques to analyze earnings calls of publicly listed firms. The results show that the text-based indicators are highly correlated with official inflation data...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns ("sales") by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the 1996 -...

In a simple two-sector New Keynesian model, sticky prices generate a counterfactual negative comovement between the output of durable and nondurable goods following a monetary policy shock. We show that heterogeneous factor markets allow any combination of strictly positive price stickiness to...

We propose a simple, model-free way to measure price selection and its impact on inflation. Price selection exists when prices that change in response to aggregate shocks are not representative of the overall population of prices. Due to selection, increases (decreases) in inflation can be...

We introduce behavioral learning equilibria (BLE) into a multi-variate linear framework and apply it to New Keynesian DSGE models. In a BLE, boundedly rational agents use simple but optimal first-order autoregressive (AR(1)) forecasting rules whose parameters are consistent with the observed...

This paper investigates the impact of market structure on the joint determination of exchange rate pass-through and currency of invoicing in international trade. A novel feature of the study is the focus on market share of firms on both sides of the market - that is, exporting firms and...

Estimating potential output and the output gap - the difference between actual output and its potential - is important for the proper conduct of monetary policy. However, the measurement and interpretation of potential output, and hence the output gap, is fraught with uncertainty, since it is...

Over the last few decades, real interest rates have trended downward in many countries. The most common explanation is that this reflects depressed demand due to demographic, technological and other real factors such as income inequality. In this paper we explore the claim that these trends may...