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...

The analysis in Ball and Romer [1991] suggests that models with fixed costs of changing price may be rife with multiple equilibria; in their static model price adjustment is always characterized by strategic complementarity, a necessary condition for multiplicity. We extend Ball and Romer's...

In simple sticky-price models, the guiding principle for optimal monetary policy is to stabilize nominal prices so as to eliminate the distortions associated with price adjustment. If there is only one sector, or one category of consumption goods, then stabilizing nominal prices means making the...

The relative prices of different categories of consumption goods have been trending over time. Assuming they are exogenous with respect to monetary policy, these trends imply that monetary policy cannot stabilize the prices of all consumption categories. If prices are sticky, monetary policy...