This paper uses unpublished retailer-level microdata underlying UK consumer price indices to investigate price rigidity. Based on the conventional method, little rigidity is found in frequency of price change, since the implied price duration is only 5.5 months. However, it significantly...

Real wage rigidities have recently been proposed as a way of building intrinsic persistence in inflation within the context of New Keynesian Phillips Curves. Using two recent illustrative structural models, we evaluate empirically the importance of real wage rigidities in the data and the extent...

Real rigidities are an important feature of modern sticky price models and are policyrelevant because of their welfare consequences, but cannot be structurally identified from time series. I evaluate the plausibility of capital specificity as a source of real rigidities using a two-dimensional...

This paper introduces staggered right-to-manage wage bargaining into a New Keynesian business cycle model. Our key result is that the model is able to generate persistent responses in output, inflation, and total labor input to both neutral technology and monetary policy shocks. Furthermore, we...

Evidence from vector autoregressions indicates that the impact of interest rate shocks on macroeconomic aggregates can substantially be affected by the so-called cost channel of monetary transmission. In this paper we apply a structural approach to examine the relevance of the cost channel for...

Using Japanese scanner data of transaction prices and sales for more than 1,600 commodity groups from 1988 to 2008, we find a statistically significant negative correlation between the frequency of price changes and the degree of market concentration. We also find that structural factors of a...

Empirical data show that firms tend to improve their ranking in the productivity distribution over time. A stickyprice model with firm-level productivity growth fits this data and predicts that the optimal long-run inflation rate is positive and between 1.5% and 2% per year. In contrast, the...