The author constructs a theoretical model to examine the effects of an inherent conflict of interest between a seller of a house and the real estate broker hired by the seller. The model is then used to calibrate the broker's commission rates that would maximize the seller's expected gain. The...

To what extent do national borders and national currencies impose costs that segment markets across countries? To answer this question the authors use a dataset with product-level retail prices and wholesale costs for a large grocery chain with stores in the United States and Canada. They...

Analysis of oil-price movements is once again an important feature of economic policy discussions. To provide some background for this analysis, this paper summarizes a conference on the oil market held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in June 2010. Four cross-cutting themes emerged from...

Understanding the evolution of real-time beliefs about house price appreciation is central to understanding the U.S. housing crisis. At the peak of the recent housing cycle, both borrowers and lenders appealed to optimistic house price forecasts to justify undertaking increasingly risky loans....

Presented by Eric S. Rosengren, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, for the Connecticut Business and Industry Association’s 2008 Economic Summit and Outlook, Hartford, Connecticut. January 8, 2008

Presented by Eric S. Rosengren, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, for The Seventeenth Annual Vermont Economic Outlook Conference, Burlington, Vermont, January 11, 2008

The closed and open economy literatures both work on evaluating the role of real rigidities, but in parallel. This paper brings the two literatures together. We use international price data and exchange rate shocks to evaluate the importance of real rigidities in price setting. We show that,...

We study a model of portfolio choice, in which housing prices are predictable and adjustment costs must be paid when there is a housing transaction. We show that two state variables affect the agent's decisions: (i) his wealth-house ratio; and (ii) the time-varying expected growth rate of...

The seminal work of Phelps, Taylor, and Calvo developed forward-looking models of price determination that imparted inertia to the price level. These models incorporate expectations of future prices and excess demand by imposing constraints (typically lag-lead symmetry constraints) that force...

This study estimates a model of overlapping nominal price contracts over three distinct monetary policy regimes, testing the stability of the parameters in the model across regimes. Upon finding a model that is stable over the three subsamples, the model then holds for the most recent monetary...