Using data from three sources (a laboratory experiment, a field study, and a large US supermarket chain), we document a surprising asymmetric behavior of 9-ending prices: they are more rigid upward, but not downward, in comparison to non 9-ending prices. The data from the lab experiment and the...

Inflation is painful, for firms, customers, employees, and society. But careful study of periods of hyperinflation point to ways that firms can adapt. In particular, companies need to think about how to change prices regularly and cheaply - because constant price changes can ultimately be very,...

The monetary economy has properties that cannot be analyzed using the tools of today's dynamic general equilibrium analysis. Keynes's economics, far from being an aberration in the otherwise orderly evolution of modern macroeconomics from Adam Smith's ideas about the "invisible hand", was a...

The monetary economy has properties that cannot be analyzed using the tools of today's dynamic general equilibrium analysis. Keynes's economics, far from being an aberration in the otherwise orderly evolution of modern macroeconomics from Adam Smith's ideas about the "invisible hand", was a...

This paper explores zero lower bound (ZLB) economics. The ZLB is widely invoked to explain stagnation and it fits with the long tradition that argues Keynesian economics is a special case based on nominal rigidities. The ZLB represents the newest rigidity. Contrary to ZLB economics, not only...

In macroeconomic models, the level of price dispersion - which is typically approximated through its relationship with inflation - is a central determinant of welfare, the cost of business cycles, the optimal rate of inflation, and the tradeoff between inflation and output stability. While the...

Bagus and Howden (2011) argue that price stickiness is a poor justification for advocating a flexible money supply through the issuing of fiduciary media under central or free banking. They view the contraction in output following an exogenous increase in money demand as an optimal response,...

We document that persistent and lagged inflation (with respect to output) is a world-wide phenomenon in that these short-run inflation dynamics are highly synchronized across countries. In particular, the average cross-country correlation of inflation is significantly and systematically stronger...

Macroeconomic models with microeconomic foundations face a difficult task: they must be consistent with facts both large and small. This paper proposes a model that combines two strands of the literature on stickiness in order to match both sets of facts. (1) Firms acquire information...

I use the measures of frequency of price adjustment in Nakamura and Steinsson (2008) to show that stickier price industries have higher levels of output response to monetary policy shocks. Using a Vector Auto-regression model, I build different measures of response to a monetary policy shock of...