We ask why, in many circumstances and many environments, decision-makers choose to act on a time-regular basis (e.g. adjust every six weeks) or on a stateregular basis (e.g. set prices ending in a 9), even though such an approach appears suboptimal. The paper attributes regular behaviour to...

This paper provides some new empirical features on price setting behaviour for French producers using micro data underlying the producer and business-services price indices over the period 1994-2005. Some crucial methodological issues on the collection of producer prices are raised. Then, the...

This paper documents producer price setting in 6 countries of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. It collects evidence from available studies on each of those countries and also provides new evidence. These studies use monthly producer price data. The following...

This paper compares the welfare implications of two widely used pricing assumptions in the New-Keynesian literature: Calvo-pricing vs. Rotemberg-pricing. We show that despite the strong similarities between the two assumptions to a first order of approximation, in general they might entail...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

We implement a tractable state-dependent Calvo price-setting signal dependent on inflation and aggregate competitiveness. This allows us to derive a New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) expressed in terms of the actual levels of variables - rather than in-deviation from “steady state” form -...

This paper provides estimates of price-marginal cost ratios or markups for 50 sectors in 8 euro area countries and the US over the period 1981-2004. The estimates are obtained applying the methodology developed by Roeger (1995) on the EU KLEMS March 2007 database. Five stylized facts are...

We review the recent literature that studies new, detailed micro data on prices. We discuss implications of the new micro data for macro models. We argue that the new micro data are helpful for macro models, but not decisive. There is no simple mapping from the frequency of price changes in...

This paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to, subject to a constraint on information flow. When idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions, firms pay more attention to idiosyncratic conditions than to...

Using data on product-level prices matched to the producing �rm�s unit labor cost, we reject the hypothesis of a full and immediate pass-through of marginal cost. Since we focus on idiosyncratic variation, this does not �t the predictions of the Ma´ckowiak and Wiederholt (2009) version of...